Whether you’re starting a new business and want to build a solid foundation, or you’re looking to find new efficiency in a longstanding one, improving your contact centre operations is a good place to start. Whether it’s through strategic hiring, using a new software platform, or thinking strategically about the ways your customers reach out for assistance, there’s a lot you can do to improve the operations of your contact centre in the UK.
Read on for six strategies you might try:
Listen to your customers, and learn from them
The feedback you get from your customers is one of the most valuable sources of insight you have. Whether through surveys, analytics, emails, or any other source of direct response, you can learn a great deal about where you could improve and what you’re doing well. The good and the bad are important, so you can spend resources on training where needed and so you can encourage employees who are doing well.
Listen to your agents, too
Good customer service can help your business, so leave no stone unturned when it comes to finding information that could help you improve your contact centre operations.
Who else knows the customer experience as well as the consumers themselves? The agents who speak with them every day. While you should absolutely listen to your buyers, if you don’t get feedback from your agents, you’re leaving a vital source of invaluable information untapped.
Consider holding regular meetings with your agents or a forum for company employees to share their experiences and ideas for how to improve your operations.
Hire a diverse team
Hiring a diverse team can help your business in a lot of ways. Plus, it’s the smart strategy more generally. A McKinsey report from 2015 looked at 366 public companies. It was 35% more likely that companies ranking in the top quartile for diversity (ethnic and racial) in management would earn returns above their industry’s mean. (1)
An article from 2016 in the Harvard Business Review built on this study and others to help explain why. One key factor is that diverse teams focus more on the facts in a given situation, and they process those facts with more care. (2)
Work to break down department silos
You need to keep channels of communication open between the different parts of your business. Not only will it help you collaborate better, but it will also help you understand how to manage processes that bridge the different parts of your operation.
Plus, it gives you a chance to determine how to better run your contact centre. If you really understand what problems customers and clients are facing, you can communicate that information to the rest of your business, and vice versa, rather than treating service as something that belongs locked away in a call centre.
Keep routing in mind
Customers today want personalised service, and they want it fast. Keeping callers waiting in a single, long queue just won’t cut it. They may not even wait around long enough to talk with your customer service team, no matter how talented they are.
You need to understand how complicated an issue routing has become. If you’re offering multiple channels, as you should be, customers will each follow a different journey. At the same time, you’ll want to keep track of their information no matter which channel they’ve arrived through.
Don’t confuse reducing costs for increasing efficiency
It would be easy to think that if you’re making more money (or you’re spending less), then you’re making progress when it comes to running a more efficient operation. That’s not always true. For example, if you put off upgrading your equipment, or you fail to hire enough staff to meet your needs, you might ‘save’ money, but it’s not a long-term solution.
Having limited staff will mean your customers are likely to experience longer wait times when they call. That means that they could be harder to deal with for your employees (since they’re more likely to be frustrated). Your representatives, in turn, may well end up more likely to burn out and leave the business.
You also don’t want to neglect infrastructure. To stay competitive, you need to offer omnichannel service. It helps make interactions with your customers more meaningful. In general, make sure you aren’t incurring a long-term cost by putting off investments in both present and future needs for your contact centre. Pursue technology where needed and staff appropriately.
Final thoughts
The common thread here is to make sure you understand the process by which your customers are reaching out for help and that you’ve found an efficient, effective way to respond. At the same time, you should make sure you hire the right people and empower them to provide you with feedback.
