Call Center Best Practices: Guiding Principles for Excellence

by | Sep 27, 2017 | Call Center

We consider the benefits and impacts on the customer in everything that we do. From the time we pick up the phone, to saying our farewell, our mission to the customer is to benefit and provide a positive impact on their needs as effectively as we can. When you’re thinking about the best experience possible for your audience, ask yourself the following questions:

  • How would my audience like to reach us beyond using the phone? Would they like the experience a chat feature or interactive voice response (IVR) offers?
  • What personas can I create to help me understand my callers’ attitudes and preferences?
  • How can I be the most helpful to my audience? 
  • What’s stopping me from delivering this using call center best practices and call center quality assurance best practices?

People Are Your Primary Asset

It is not enough to just have staff, but to have excellent call center agents. We motivate our employees with our culture. We help develop their growth by coaching them. Also, welcoming their ideas by giving them access to speak their minds and suggest improvements. Employees that feel they’re part of the call center team will want to make a difference, and we promote that with everything that we do. Questions you can consider asking your team using Call Center Best Practices:

  • Are you happy in your role?
  • What can I do to support you more as a team member?
  • How are we getting in our own way of continuous improvement?

Maintain a Positive Customer Service Experience

We aim to offer friendly and reliable service to all our customers and to each other. We want to keep the same level of customer satisfaction for everyone we serve. Great customer support experience is genuine, sincere, and heartfelt. We focus on training our call center staff. This helps improve the client experience. We also plan how to provide great customer service. We use the best practices for call centers. We include quality checks to ensure high standards. Thoughts for considering your own experience:

  • Do you have a customer service vision? If not, check out ours for inspiration and ask your staff for input in creating one for your company using call center best practices.
  • What’s the best experience you’ve ever had and how can you create that for your audience with customer satisfaction scores in mind?

 

Availability Is The Key

No matter how friendly or skilled your customer service team is, if they’re not there to answer the phones, it doesn’t matter. Our aim is to maintain a constant level of availability by providing consistent utilization levels across our staff. We are ready and waiting when our customers need help in real-time. Where are you falling short on your availability performance using call center best practices?

  • Are all of your customer calls getting answered? If not, is it less than 5 percent of your total call volume?
  • Do you need to staff longer hours than your team is willing to work?

 

Creating A Vast Knowledge Base

We pride ourselves in having an accurate and ever-expanding knowledge base available to our staff. We could go on for hours about knowledge! Ask yourself these questions to get started on your own assessment using call center best practices:

  • Are you providing answers for your team to address questions in a quick and consistent manner using call monitoring?
  • Do you have a framework and process for making sure your knowledge is always up to date?
  • How much time each week are you dedicating to your knowledge effort?

 

It’s More Than a Call Center

An excellent call center does more than take calls. As an outsourced solution, a call center acts as the first point of contact for problems. An excellent call center consults, provides recommendations, and call center best practices, and grows alongside your business. Thoughts on expanding beyond your current mindset:

 

Help Customers Help Themselves

Since more people are technology savvy, they often prefer to conduct transactions and resolve issues themselves, whether online or over the phone. Integrating solutions that help them safely do it themselves can lead to fast query resolution and improve customer satisfaction using call center best practices. How are you improving here?

  • Are you looking at your top call types and then finding creative ways to eliminate those calls using call center software?
  • How does your audience find their answer if they can’t call? What resources do you offer on your website?
  • Is video part of your solution offering? “How To” videos are some of the most popular on the Internet. Is your service or product conducive to a good library of videos?

Conclusion of Thoughts 

We hope you found a few thought-provoking ideas in this post. We’re happy to help you walk through more ideas or provide a short-term consulting project to help you achieve your business growth where you want it to be.

 

 

 

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