Contact centers have many tasks to perform, ranging from spreading awareness about product/services, billing, ticketing, to helping customer purchase to handling post-purchase queries on various communication channels. While performing these crucial jobs, businesses tend to make mistakes. Most of these mistakes can be avoided but get ignored because of the pressure. These misses affect the contact center’s customer base and experience, and as a result, the customer might make your competitors win.
Impact of contact center mistakes
Lesser conversions: The queue of the customers on hold grows big when agents take long to resolve queries. This turns off people, and they tend to disconnect the call even before they get a chance to communicate with an agent. Further, customers might end up having a poor conversation with the agents. At times the frustration level is so high that the contact center never hears back from them.
Reduced ROI: With lesser conversions, your contact center business is likely to face a dip in the ROI. Frustrated customers are less likely to return, and this will affect your customer base. Today, customer experience counts more than anything, so long hold time, or inefficient agents can any day become a problem for your business. Remember, it is always more comfortable and affordable to retain an existing customer than acquiring new customers.
Poor word-of-mouth marketing: From agent scripts to the knowledge base, you can’t mistake to compromise on anything since disappointed customers will have a significant impact on your reputation. Instead of having good word-of-mouth marketing, you might end up having bad reviews and conversations for your business. People might not feel it essential to discuss the right things but they will let the world know about the bad ones.
Demotivated employee: Your mistakes not only affect the customer experience but even demotivates the agents. With not up to the mark software, poorly framed scripts, customers’ frustration, and more, the agent’s morale is hit badly. This increases attrition and call center shrinkage. Even the best employees feel burdened and service level goes down.
To avoid these situations from arising, it is necessary to know the mistakes contact centers make.
Contact center mistakes to avoid
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Not setting goals- With New Year, every business has new goals and targets to achieve. Your contact center employees, especially your agents, must be aligned with it. Agents stay focused and have an optimized performance with the contact center goals in mind as it will be achieved with their contribution. Goal setting will also help you in selecting the software and qualities you want in your agents.
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Using outdated software: Personalized customer experience is the need of the hour. So, your contact center should have a unified agent desktop that offers a 360- degree view of customer information for a personalized experience. NovelVox agent desktop is the best fit. It provides over 70 3rd party integrations. Further, it offers an interface optimization feature that allows agents to select the fields relevant to the business. This saves agents time lost in searching for information.
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Not having improved IVR – With numerous calls coming in, it gets difficult for agents to resolve queries instantly. Here, improved IVR acts as a self-help service for customers and helps them resolve queries on their own, primarily when related to fetching some information. With IVR, the customer is able to contact the agent specialized in that segment directly.
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Still away from omnichannel support– Make your contact center offer an omnichannel support service to distribute the load of calls across various channels. This helps in resolving the urgent queries instantly via the agent’s preferred mode of communication. Live chats, social media, emails, and messages are some of the standard support channels that even grow the trust of customers in your business.
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Ignoring agents: You can’t ignore the upliftment and guidance for agents. So, make use of an agent scripting tool that offers a series of dynamic scripts that can be further customized basis the business requirement. This will help agents to handle calls efficiently even as a newbie. Also, Knowledgebase, inter-team interaction are some other essential gadgets that your agents require every day for better performance.
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Not having wallboards: At the contact center, agents are not just to handle customer calls efficiently but also get appreciated for their hard work. Contact Center Wallboards are a great way to monitor the real-time performance of agents and even motivate the low performers to do their best. It further gives way to healthy competition among employees that improves every agent’s performance.
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Ignoring customer feedback: Be open to accept feedback from customers received via any communication channel and work on them. Don’t feel offended nor mistake to ignore these. Revert customers showing them you have accepted the feedback and are working on them. You can even convert the unsatisfied customers into positive ones and grow their trust in your business. This applies to employee feedback as well. If your employees are happy your customers will be delighted
So, welcome this New Year by transforming things that can increase your contact center business, delight your agent and your customers.
