Efficiency when talking about contact centers is an extremely important part of the business world. It is important to consider both customers and agents to cover the full customer experience and provide high-quality customer support.
The Customer Expectations report by Salesforce found that 84% of customers want to be assisted as actual customers and not only as a number to reach a goal at work.
Knowing this, how to increase efficiency at work while providing a high-quality and unique customer experience? This is what we’ll cover today. From implementing new tools to integrating others to provide continuous training and more, we’ve got you covered in this article.
Implement a Call Distribution System
Implementing a call distribution system will incredibly increase the efficiency of your contact center for many reasons, and for both customers and agents. Think about the number of times where your agents had to transfer a call from themselves to a colleague or to another department.
Transferring calls internally can impact agent productivity and can be annoying for customers when they need to hold the line. Increase the efficiency of both implementing a call distribution system.
Customers will be able to choose their inquiries when contacting your agents and, therefore, be able to reach the correct department at their first attempt. In addition, they won’t need to hold the line for a few minutes, and that’s an excellent way to increase efficiency but also satisfaction in the customer journey. Lastly, we highly recommend you integrating a predictive dialer into your system. This will not only increase efficiency for customers but also eliminate agents’ downtime and that only is fantastic.
Integrate Your Programs
You might have the best programs in your contact center, but if you have too many systems and apps, it will end up being a waste of time for agents and eventually for the customers. What you want from your agents is to be productive, efficient, and being able to multitask.
For this reason, integrating your programs making it only 1 or 2 will increase efficiency in your contact center. The time that your agents spend switching from one program or system to another does accumulate throughout the day and gives a negative impact on their productivity. It is always a better idea to enable your agents to integrate two or more apps, either through native integrations or third-party no-code integration platforms.
Also, another thing to consider is the time that the customer will lose on the phone, email, or chat. In fact, that precious time spent on switching programs could actually be invested in your customers and therefore help their average resolution time, which is one of the most important values in customer service.
Improve your verification process
Cybersecurity and GDPR are terms that have become very common nowadays, so are terms like data breaches and phishing attacks. For this reason, this step is not only great to increase efficiency in your contact center but also to protect your organization and customers’ data.
Increasing your verification and security processes highly increases the efficiency of contact centers. Since a verification process has become pretty much mandatory in all fields and that customers need to provide a verification code or a pin code, it can easily end up in a waste of time. Imagine being a customer reaching out to an agent and not having your pin code ready. This will result in the agent wasting time on this case, decreasing his average resolution, and make him not able to help other customers in need.
An easy and smooth verification process is a simple step in the customer journey that can have a massive impact on your contact center. Improve your process to increase efficiency in your contact center and you’ll see great improvements.
An easy and organized way to improve this process is to communicate to the customer that they will need to have their verification code ready at the start of the call or live chat. This will not only make the client ready for the call but eventually, avoid the agent wasting precious time on useless waiting time. Moreover, you can implement two-factor authentication for customers reaching out on online channels for the agents to gain precious time and increase efficiency.
Lastly, customers prefer companies that show commitment to their verification processes. A survey by IDology found that 38% of consumers are more likely to use a company showing that commitment, followed by 33% of them being more likely to use that company.
Provide Continuous Training at Work
Providing training to your customer service agents is a great way to continuously improve their skills, productivity, and efficiency. In fact, while you might have a training period at work, agents need constant training to develop their skills, strengthen their productivity, and avoid making mistakes.
For instance, providing multi-tasking training at work is an excellent way to teach them how to handle multiple tasks at once. While this might not have a direct impact on their customers, it does have an impact on the waiting time, resulting in clients waiting less before reaching an agent online or on the phone.
You could also use a wide variety of online learning platforms to help your employees learn important skills that can help them better serve customers and deliver more efficient results.
Providing training to your agents will increase their efficiency at work and this translates to being more productive for customers, ending up making the most of their time at work.
Create an Omnichannel Contact Center
Multiplying the ways to contact your company is an essential way to increase efficiency and it will affect how your clients perceive your general marketing communication. Clients nowadays don’t want to rely on only one channel and want to have multiple contact points. Also, people crave attention and want an immediate response which will eventually help your organization grow and advertise better customer service.
The State of Customer Service report by Microsoft revealed that 66% of global customers surveyed use 3 more or more channels. In addition, 52% of customers surveyed start interacting with customer support online.
Having your agents take care of specific tasks rather than many different ones will create a routine and will, therefore, help them in becoming experts at what they do. For instance, agents only taking care of the live chat will be very efficient helping customers via chatbot and the same goes for emails, calls, or social media posting
In essence, having an omnichannel contact center will increase customer satisfaction, will make them choose the most available channel to reach an agent, and ultimately will help agents assisting clients the right way at the right touchpoint.
Conclusion
These were the absolute best tips to increase the efficiency of contact centers to benefit customers and agents.
If we were to give another tip to your organization, it would definitely be to implement an Artificial Intelligence product to your system in order to maximize productivity, minimize agents’ downtime, and reply to common queries automatically.
Bear in mind that clients actually value a company’s customer service. A study by Dimensional Research revealed that 72% of consumers complain about having to explain their issues or inquiry to multiple agents due to poor customer service.
Now that you know how to increase efficiency in contact centers, you’ll probably have fewer complaints from customers. Start implementing these changes and your consumers will advertise your customer service online, giving you a potential better reputation.
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Author:
Maria Mladenovska is a Content Manager at DigitalNovas – an online guide about how to become a digital marketing expert. She is passionate about marketing and her curiosity to learn is ever-evolving. She focuses specifically on writing and editing engaging articles, blog posts, and other forms of publication.
