What Does Your Call Center Software Say About Your Business
Call centers play a key role in bridging the gap between the business management and its consumers. With the advent of technology, many businesses are now handling floods of customer queries and opinions. This in turn allows for management to better understand their consumer’s needs and problems.
By 2020, Forrester Research reports that customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator. The quality of service a business offers can correlate to the technology set in place. It is important to select the solution that is the best fit for your company’s needs and allows your team to carry out day-to-day tasks in the best way possible. These tasks can range anywhere from handling large fluxes of calls all day to managing customer information in an organized fashion. With so many software providers and features available, evaluating how these features will directly impact your business and the service you provide is crucial.
To be successful, corporate management must set clear expectations for call centers, and then put in place the tools that will allow agents to succeed. There are many ways a call center solution can characterize your business:
Reporting and Analytics
A successful call center solution will integrate both your staff as well as customer feedback. Being able to act on customer sentiment can make all the difference to a call center. However, acting and initiating employee training without the proper insight can be ineffective.
As a former call center manager and WhitePages Director of Accounts, John Neely sees the need for practical data. “Companies need to distribute the right data to agents to make centers more actionable. In a competitive and commoditized business environment, you have to look at call centers as a competitive advantage. Agents able to use the training they’ve been given are happier in their jobs. They’ll stay longer in what is a high-turnover profession and the company will see results improve.”
One of the most important aspects of a call center solution is the ability to gather sufficient information involving performance and customer feedback. Managers and supervisors should be able to make data-driven decision based on reports generated by software. Through the use of real-time and historical data, you can leverage your services to positively impact your KPIs and benchmark progress. One of the key tools is a reporting dashboard, which generates reports that are easily interpretable and actionable. It brings unity to processes and systems to allow you to make better business decisions and ensure your brand’s standards.
Ultimately, training based on the sales expectations and reinforced by an up-to-date, efficient system that handles not only the customer experience, but an individual agent’s performance, lays the groundwork for a better call center – and that means happy customers and revenue growth.
Scalability
Technology should not stall the growth of an evolving company. Your software should be able to accommodate for growth when your business demands it by ensuring your new projects are scalable to an existing infrastructure, platform and products. You may also find the need to hire remote agents or have agents in a new satellite office be able to communicate with the agents at headquarters. Expanding and bringing new agents onboard should be a streamlined process. It should not take extensive time or effort to bring the team up-to-date.
Reliability
Customer service quality is gaged by its availability, reliability, security and uptime. If your software is not living up to these criteria, it is more than likely that your business may not be either. In competitive markets, even one customer complaint can be one too many.
Are you commonly experiencing crashes, outages or a large number of complaints regarding dropped calls or inaccessibility? Do you find that your IT team is constantly fixing issues or bugs with your call center software? If so, it is important to re-evaluate your current solution and find technology that can ensure your business is reliable. You may find a cloud-based or browser-based software option to be more effective in providing comprehensive support. This would ultimately allow your IT team to handle other tech issues rather than have to deal with your software problems.
Streamlined Processes
Some businesses may not have a fully integrated business system implemented. This means that the CRM, help desk software, e-commerce platform and ticketing technology may all be managed in separate systems. This may be costing your call center agents time and effort by having to enter the same data into multiple systems.
As a result, important customer information may be slipping through the cracks. Call center software should be streamlined and integrated with all other business applications to ensure that the workflow and customer information is dependable. Synchronized call center software will increase your business’s productivity and customer experience.
Multichannel interactions
While the telephone may still be your business’s main basis of communication with customers, it is important that your software be able to handle multi channel interaction. We are now able to reach anyone at anytime through a wide range of mediums. The development of social media and mobile platforms allow customers another form of contacting businesses through the web. However, 58% of consumers say they are frustrated with inconsistent experiences from channel to channel (as reported by the American Express Customer Service Barometer).
A company that is able to keep up with new forms of communication and manage all types of media will benefit in the long run, whether they are using these mediums currently or not. Software that helps gain perspective of the overall customer experience across all types of interactions such as chat, calls email, web, mobile and social media, allows a business to meet their consumer’s needs best.
Flexibility
Some call center solutions may not adapt well to changing business requirements. Creating new prompts in your marketing campaigns or amending IVR flows should be able to be implemented without having to consult with your software provider.
To ensure that changes can be made on the fly, it is important that contact center managers and not the software provider have full control of the business.
Productivity
Many call centers have different types of agents designated to handle specific tasks, such as inbound and outbound agents. However, there may be situations when inbound traffic is slow and agents are idle. With a click of a button, your software should allow your inbound agents to process outbound calls or campaigns and vice versa. The ability for your software to support blended agents allows for efficient use of staffing and resources, which directly impacts your call center’s productivity.
Easiness
Do your call center agents find the technology helpful and easy to use? If your software lacks functionality or the user-interface is too complex, these pain-points will most likely be reflected in the quality of your customer service. Forrester Research reports that 42% of call center associates cannot resolve customer issues because of archaic user interfaces, multiple applications, and disconnected systems.
Your agents use this technology to perform everyday tasks, so your call center’s software should be leveraged to meet their needs. Inquire with your call center team to determine what features agents are struggling with and what features are needed.
In today’s competitive market, acting on customer feedback can have a huge impact on the service your business provides. Carefully applying some sense and discrimination into employing call center management software can help revolutionize your business and increase your revenue.
**
Daphne Lefran has been writing about customer service topics for many years and currently writes on behalf of the call center recording specialists at Kova Corp. In her spare time she enjoys capturing moments through a camera lens, traveling to new places and cheering on the Florida State Seminoles. Follow her on Twitter @daphnelefran.