High Staff Turnover
High staff turnover rates are a particular problem of most call centers – typical rates stand at about 35%. The reasons for this high turnover tend to be the relentlessness of the high-pressure environment, frequently tedious work, and burnout. Replacing staff that leave costs your business time, resources, and money, but the reasons for staff members handing in their notice can be mitigated so that you have a much better chance of keeping individual members of your team for longer. Employee engagement is absolutely key to retaining your staff. Creating a strong and supportive workforce culture will help with this: implementing a reward scheme with online trackers is an effective way to motivate staff, and organizing regular social events is also a great idea to make your workforce feel valued.
Unreliable Phone Lines
Fundamental to the success of your call center, on the most basic level, is the reliability and quality of the phone lines – this is especially important if your business operates on a global stage, and your call center will be handling calls from all over the world. Traditional landline phones can be problematic and prone to downtime, system interruption, or interference on the line, which can affect the sound quality of calls made and received, which can negatively impact your customers’ view of your business. To avoid this problem from the get-go, many call centers now deploy VoIP (Voice-over-Internet Protocol) technology, which makes for a more reliable and higher quality service. VoIP is a significantly cheaper option, too! VoIP uses the internet to make calls and, as a result, can offer much greater uptime and less chance of service disruption. Have a look here for more information on how a VoIP call center works, the price you can expect to pay for various packages, and how using this technology could benefit your enterprise.
Not Resolving Problems On the First Call
The aim of your call center should be, as far as possible, to resolve every customers’ issue during the first call, without requiring the customer to call again with the same problem. Getting it right the first time is one of the best things your center can do to promote customer retention and optimize the callers’ overall experience of your business. If your first call resolution rates are low, this could have significant negative results for your enterprise: avoid this by first identifying the reasons that could cause it. High levels of absenteeism or staff with too high a workload is often a key cause: if your workforce is stretched too thin, they may simply be under too much pressure to give each call the time it warrants. Automating processes so that the simplest customer queries are handled by chatbots is a good way of freeing up staff time to spend resolving the more complex issues – the first time.
Insufficient Self Service Options
Having some simple ways for customers to find the answers to their queries is an effective way both to improve overall customer experience and to take the pressure off your call center staff. Insufficient self-service options can both frustrate users and result in unnecessary calls, taking up employee time.
Poor Customer Satisfaction
If those contacting your call center often feel as if they’ve not received the service that they expected, then this could be bad news for your business as a whole. But it can be avoided; analyzing the interactions that callers have with your center is vital to discovering where things are going right – and which elements of the service need changing to improve customer satisfaction. To this end, a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system may be invaluable to you; this kind of software can generate detailed reports to let you see patterns in behavior and to create surveys that will allow you to collect the feedback you need to find out exactly how to improve.
Poor Employee Organization
If your employees aren’t properly trained, or if your rotas don’t ensure the correct level of staffing, then your call center won’t be able to function as well as it could. Put in place measures to avoid this eventuality by creating a high-quality, consistent training and induction program for new staff so that they can hit the ground running. Workplace optimization software may be a useful tool for you to keep track of individual staff members’ performance so that you can identify where extra training could be required.
