How to Drive Contact Center Performance

For many companies, great customer service can be a costly and exhausting endeavor. However, if you improve the way your customers interact with your contact center, you can reduce a lot of issues. A primary objective of a contact center should be to build the type of employee engagement that will result in enhanced customer loyalty and satisfaction, as well as improve the impact on the bottom-line of their business.

Optimize agent performance

The best way to enhance customer satisfaction and contact center performance is by optimizing agent performance. Companies should find ways to reduce average handle time and call volumes while increasing first call resolution. Companies must ensure that their agents fully understand the use of various channel options such as chat, calls and email, and that all these channel options are properly optimized for customer interactions.

Encourage creativity in the agent

Many professionals in the contact center are attracted to the nature of their occupation, which is customer interaction. However, companies restrain them from engaging with customers emotionally, and instead force them to follow strict scripts. By allowing contact center agents some creative liberty companies can improve their performance as this will let them create emotional attachment to the task, which will ensure that each interaction with customer will become a personal interaction, rather than a generic corporate experience.
Prepare business cases for change

Companies must prepare business cases that include illustrations of various problems with compelling facts. Also, these cases should clearly state the parameters of ideal performance and how to achieve them. Measures and metrics that align operations to a department, a team, or an executive must be clearly provided as it’s vital to achieving key performance objectives.

Increase awareness among agents

It is vital that contact center agents must always be motivated as it will allow them to accept new day-to-day work challenges. A monotonous work environment can be highly regressive for a contact center agent. Companies should encourage agents to make contributions to their work processes, and continually teach them new skills and abilities. This way, agents will never feel that their skill sets are diminishing, and this will not only reduce employee attrition rate, but will also enhance their performance.

In many organizations, the drive for efficiency is often seen to be at the expense of the customer. However, a knowledgeable employee  who has been with the company for some time and has the ability to deal with multiple queries on one call will offer the customer a one-stop shop approach to their query. Organizations who spend the time and energy to include the above mentioned principles of contact center management find that their employees are better capable at delivering consistent positive, quality, branded customer experiences that build better customer relationships.

The Role of the Contact Center Team Leader

A call center’s team leader is a critical part of the business’ success. They play a significant role in boosting team’s morale and encouraging success and diversity. In this article, we’ll highlight the role of the call center team leader as well as the attributes that he/she should possess for the success of a call center.

What is a call center team leader responsible for?

A team leader actively enforces the goals of the operation, policies and procedures, implements plans in the organization’s training and development programs, handles escalations, supports agents, monitors the cue, and works in conjunction with the administration. 

A team leader in a call center is the one responsible for managing team of agents  to ensure that they are performing towards achieving their targets They review their performance and provide coaching and training. Team leaders meet with the manager on a regular basis to not only give feedback but also to receive instructions or actions. They are the one responsible for keeping agents informed of what is happening in the call center that may have an impact on them. At times, team leaders are involved in the recruitment of new agents to work on specific projects for the call center. 

Attributes that a call center team leader should possess

·         Management skills-A team leader should demonstrate the ability to manage the call center agents and other operations.

·         Coaching skills-They should be skilled in delivering instructive, collaborative, supportive, and motivational coaching sessions that boost open communications. He/she should be able to diagnose performance issues and be able to develop effective action plans to address the main cause of the issue. 

·         Analytical skills- Team leaders should be able to identify business trends and opportunities as well as underlying threats, and be able to provide effective suggestions for developments.

·         Goal- focused skills-A team leader should consistently meet all established goals and accomplish tasks in a commendable manner and timely basis.

·         Prioritization- A team leader needs to demonstrate the ability to prioritize issues based on urgency and scope of impact. He/she should be capable of effectively managing multiple projects.

·         Motivation skills- They should know how to create a strong sense of job satisfaction and keep all call center agents motivated, by effectively communicating, recognizing, and rewarding good performance. He should be able to identify effective ways of developing and enhancing agent’s skills.

·         Ownership/initiative- Being a team leader in a call center, one needs to volunteer and participate or lead new initiatives. He should take ownership of tasks and make sure they are completed.

·         Communication skills- Effective communication is one of the crucial skills that every team leader, regardless of the industry should possess. He should be able to professionally communicate to subordinates, peers, agents, as well as senor level management. 

·         Personnel skills- As a team leader, one should show the ability to maintain confidentiality and address sensitive issues appropriately, in accordance with HR procedures. He should prove to handle difficult issues with total professionalism, and a well-documented plan for resolution.

If a team leader possesses all the above attributes, a call center can move to greater heights.

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Contact Center Upgrades

Many companies have recently been looking for ways to upgrade the infrastructure and communication capabilities of their contact centers. These upgrades include moving into a multichannel system, moving into the cloud, and improving the overall infrastructure of the contact center.

Although multichannel contact centers have been feasible for at least a decade, there are few of them around lately. According to experts, this needs to change because the need is getting bigger and bigger due to the growth of mobile devices that feature voice and text-based communications from any device at any time.

Companies have a responsibility to communicate with customers through traditional platforms as well as text and chat. Unfortunately, many contact centers are not set up to accommodate multichannel users as they should. Their technology is simply not up to par.

Contact center managers should attempt to understand the needs of their customers by looking at unstructured data and speech analytics. According to an article on TechTarget, companies should “assess the end-to-end experience from the customer's point of view, starting with the customer's initial entry point of communication and moving through the Web experience to phone calls, emails and chat. The next step is assessing whether the company can deliver that seamless experience and identifying gaps in the infrastructure.”

Companies have plenty of options when it comes to call center upgrades, but they need to make sure they have a solid upgrade strategy that will ultimately improve the quality of customer care.

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