How to improve contact centre operation for positive customer experience

Complaints about poor customer care service are no longer uncommon. You must have come across a rude or frustrating agent sometime in your life. These are some of the things that customers go through and are amplified by the fact that many companies don't take the necessary initiative to get rid of such experiences.

As a business owner or a department manager, what should you do to improve contact centre operations and reduce customer complaints? Of course, this question has been posted to experts many times, but is there a solution? Fortunately, yes!

There are many ways to enhance the experience of your customers when dealing with call centre agents. From technological advancements to agent training, you can make several improvements and rebuild your brand's reputation. Read on to learn more!

1. Improve employee experience

Many businesses have failed to provide a positive customer experience, not due to a lack of commitment towards consumer demands but because they neglected their employees. As an employer, always keep in mind that your workers are the main stakeholders at the company. Therefore, if you don't take care of their needs, they're likely to end up channelling their frustrations to the nearest recipients. Unfortunately, customers are the first people that interact with your contact centre agents; so, you can imagine what might follow.

How will you improve your company's agent experience in the UK? Well, the first step is to provide a conducive work environment. Enough lighting, comfortable seats, well-organized rooms, and high-spec computers are some of the things you should consider. Creating such an environment will make your workers enjoy their duties, which is beneficial to the organization and customers.

Another factor in which you should take a keen interest is the agents' mental health. Remember, they deal with different types of people daily. As such, their emotions are taken on a merry-go-round, and that's quite dangerous for their mental state.

In fact, many have quit the job simply because they couldn't deal with the stress. You can solve this issue by offering compulsory regular counselling sessions and ensuring that the agents get enough rest before their next shift.

2. Equip your agents with the necessary tools

In this day and age, manual diallers and hardcopy files have become absolute. Therefore, using such tools will only drag operations and make it impossible to meet the ever-changing consumer demands. Therefore, if you're looking to improve contact centre productivity and your customers' experience, you'll need to update your systems to the latest versions.

The best place to start is by investing in auto dialler systems. This will reduce the unnecessary time wastage experienced when using manual diallers. The best thing about auto-diallers is the fact that they can be integrated into your computers and make it easy for the agents to capture any information related to the call. (1)

It might seem like an obvious idea to provide your agents with all relevant company information, but you'll be surprised how many businesses ignore this factor. Customers view your agents as experts and will expect them to know the answer to any company-related question. Therefore, making it easy for your employees to access such information will improve your brand's reputation and enhance the experience of any existing or prospective client.

3. Prioritize a call distribution system

If you asked any customer care agent what they 'hate' about their job, the high-call volume would be one of the answers. This is an issue faced by many employees working in this department, but that can be solved. It was considered part of the job in the past, but employing that mentality today will only impact your business negatively.

So, how does a call distribution enhance customer service success? As the name suggests, it reduces the number of calls received by a single agent and distributes them across the rest of the stations and any other communication channel. One of the best innovations that have helped businesses deal with this problem is the call-back solution.

Simply put, a call-back system ensures that customers are not left waiting in line during peak hours. Instead, the system hangs up the call, and the customer is called back whenever there is an agent ready to speak with them. This gets rid of any frustrations that, which were a norm in the old call systems.

Conclusion

How you plan to invest in contact centre operations will, subsequently, have a huge impact on the customers' experience. To ensure that everything runs smoothly in this department, you'll need to provide a conducive work environment and invest in the necessary tools.

Call-back options, for instance, ensures that customer care agents have a manageable number of calls to work on at a time. Offering cancelling programs to the agents also plays a huge role in ensuring that they cope with the stress that comes with handling various clients.