Smart Ways to Improve the Efficiency of Your Contact Center Agents
Contact centers are the ’hotspots’ for maintaining a company’s customer satisfaction metric. And so, there is always room for improvement of the internal processes and augmentation of the output efficiency. With more and more businesses focusing on making their Contact centers run with optimum efficiency, many of them still struggle to achieve the desired result. However, there are many crucial areas in the functioning model of a Contact center which, upon revamping, will run it like a well-lubed machine.
In this post, you will come across smart ways to improve the efficiency of your contact center agents. Let us get going!
Set Processes to Steer Clear of Common Problems
Your contact center agents might be the best of talent when it comes to their functioning at an individual level. However, rarely do organizations have the luxury to let agents work individually rather than a team! For the team of Contact center agents to function without any major obstacles, processes need to be set. This is a common theme of ‘Guided Process Workflow’ wherein the employees (Agents in this case) are equipped with the checklists, best practice processes, and the right subject matter expertise to deal with any sort of inbound/outbound call.
Often, the common Call center agent problems arise due to weak subject knowledge, no processes at place, or poor soft skills. Set the right processes that will act as a ‘Playbook’ for your Contact center team.
Implement an L&D Agenda
An organization’s output is the net sum of its employee’s competence, knowledge and its application in the everyday professional work. This is a far more plausible concept for a Contact Center because of the competence, skills and underlying significance attributed to it. The idea here is to make your Contact Center agents learn constantly, more trainable, and autonomous. Implementing a training schedule in the beginning will help you a lot. Add new customer service skills, technical competence, soft skills, etc. in your mandate and tweak it as per your needs. As your team size grows bigger, you can transform your Training schedule into a full Learning & Development framework that will ease up Contact Center scalability.
Call Monitoring & Mentoring
A great contact center is the one where agents are given regular feedbacks on ‘what to improve’ along with ‘how to improve?’ The most effective way to do it is monitoring random Agent calls. You can measure many performance parameters that way and provide the agent with a detailed feedback regarding the performance. Moreover, the data collected via multiple call monitoring sessions over a period of time can be coagulated to pin-point the real challenges that you can address cumulatively. For example, it might be a recurring problem that the Contact agents get stuck at resolving technical conflicts, etc. This measure will help you make your Contact center team much more efficient.
Right Agent/Supervisor Ratio
For avoiding a day when ruckus eats up your Contact center’s productivity, it is highly recommended that you figure out the suitable Agent-to-supervisor ratio for your entire team. The right ratio will ensure proper process monitoring, right guidance, lower escalation rates, and cumulative growth of the Contact Agents altogether. Observations and surveys reveal that the general ratio of 25:1 is sufficient for handling a growing contact center. Ensuring this will surely boost the gross output by your Calling team.
With the right strategy and careful implementation, your Contact center can be as efficient as an engine. Keep implementing the above-mentioned points to see the results in the next couple of weeks.