Today, many call center managers from Small and Medium Business use contact center software solutions to manage their day-to-day operations. One of the primary issues faced by a Call Center Manager is to determine the right workflow and resource utilization strategy to manage variable call traffic. Often a huge pain-point for the manager, this issue can be easily tackled if proper research and strategy is developed.
Step 1 – Do Research
Before taking any important decision, it is necessary to understand the business process and end user “pain areas.” A manager must prepare a checklist of questions and find answers for them. Common questions include answers to the following pointers:
In-depth understanding of the call center process
Identify pain areas why customer call
Identify previous dates on which the traffic was high
Strategy followed by the previous manager
The Bottlenecks faced by the previous manager on those dates
Resource utilization during those dates
An efficient manager or business using quality and scalable call center software solutions will easily find history of call logs and reports to drill down and prepare a strong work plan.
Step 2 - Prepare and train your customer service representative
After the research is done and strategy is prepared, it is the time to share important points and train your customer service representatives about these “high-tide” dates. An efficient manager will always follow an agile approach and do a stand-up meeting. A business using cloud customer service software can even record training videos and upload them to the cloud so that they are easily accessible to all the agents.
Step 3 – Using call centre software to either automate or manually operate the agent/station time out process
Even after doing all the preparations, exceptions happen and you may find a rise in traffic during emergency and natural calamities. If your business utilizes cloud contact center software, you can set a station timeout for your agents dynamically.
If the time-out is set at a maximum or a logical time line, customer’s wait time will be 0, and they will be automatically connected with the agent.
Managers can set an ACW (After Call Work) after the call is finished so that agents can document the case and maintain important notes. Once the ACW is over, agents will get a ring on their VOIP phone or web interface to take a new call.
Managers must observe and supervise the break timings and educate the representatives not to leave their seat during heavy call traffic due to the set station time-out. Managers should keep the greeting scripts handy on agents’ desks and rehearse with them so that they are always prepared to give greetings with the same professional spirit.
This ensures sloppy greetings are not given and agents are attentive. Managers can arrange snacks and surprise gifts for the best performers to keep them motivated. Your floor should have a space for board games like Table Tennis to maintain a great tempo and enthusiasm during high-end call traffic. Games will keep the representatives stress-free.
For sales representatives, outbound call center software also provides similar functionality, and manager can hear Live Recordings and monitor the Sales force activities to improve ROI on outbound calling.
Conclusion
So, maintaining the right station time out, ACW, and stress-free atmosphere on the call center floor will help you to get happy customers, maximum productivity, and better employee retention.
With the changing technology trends, a small business must also upgrade the basic and expensive telephony services to a light-weighted, cost-effective and dynamic call center software so that they can manage their traffic easily.
It is very important that if this small business scales rapidly, the software must be “pre-customized” to serve any traffic or solve the business pain areas for customer service and sales. It is important to choose the best telemarketing software available in the market to manage call traffic of any size.
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