Streamline operations

When you’re handling large call volumes each day, every second counts. You don’t want messy, unclear procedures and sloppy workflows to waste your time and resources. Using good management practices can ensure your call center operations are more structured and efficient, saving time and resources.

Using appropriate call center software helps ensure that each call goes through all the appropriate channels, maintaining your workflows and reducing issues and delays. This provides a better working environment for agents and a smoother experience for customers.

Improve customer experience

Customer service is one of the most important components of CRM and a fundamental factor in boosting revenue. Call center management aims to identify ways in which you can improve service quality and provide a more well-rounded and positive customer experience.

This can involve analyzing crucial KPIs, like call quality, customer satisfaction ratings and average call handling times. You can then use the insights you discover to create long-term growth and improvement strategies.

Reduce employee attrition

Lack of job satisfaction is a major issue among call center employees. According to a report by Zendesk, less than 30% of call center agents feel empowered in their jobs. Call centers experience some of the highest employee turnover rates among all industries. Having to continuously hire and train new employees while losing experienced agents to attrition can result in a major waste of resources.

Part of creating a well-managed call center involves giving agents a better working environment and a better system to address their grievances. This reduces attrition and enables you to hold on to experienced employees for longer.

Automate processes

Manual work can be tedious, time-consuming and prone to errors. Automating repetitive tasks with AI-based tools saves you time and resources, allowing your agents to focus their energy on more important things.

McKinsey found that contact center automation was one of the most common applications of AI between 2020 and 2021. Here are some common tools you can use to automate different aspects of your call center’s operations:

• Automatic call distribution tools can automatically assign calls to agents, reduce wait times and prevent errors like agent collisions.
• IVR, or interactive voice response, can help you create response trees to categorize calls more easily.
• Auto-dialers can help outbound call centers handle large call volumes more efficiently.
• Auto-attendant systems act like virtual phone attendants and route calls through the appropriate channels so your customers are sent to the right agents.

Turn data into actionable insights

The secret to sustaining growth is adaptability. You need to be able to adapt to changing demands and variables. Doing this requires having the most recent and accurate data at all times.

Software can automatically collect this data for you as your business moves through its daily operations, arming you with the information you need to keep up with market trends, identify areas of growth and improvement, and create strategies accordingly.

You can also create reports focused on specific KPIs, like the number of calls on hold, longest wait times, average wait time, service level and average call duration. Data related to agent performance not only helps you ensure quality, but also gives you the opportunity to reward top-performing agents and identify underperformers.

FAQs

What Is Call Center Management?

Call center management is a set of processes, strategies and practices that go into managing a call center and making sure it runs smoothly.

A call center is a department or facility that handles phone calls as part of a customer service or phone marketing operation. Inbound call centers mostly handle incoming calls from customers, while outbound call centers are usually marketing- and sales-oriented. Different kinds of call centers have different goals and often require unique management strategies.

What Are Some Best Practices for Call Center Management?

Call centers usually employ a huge workforce and so good call center management rests heavily on people management. It’s essential to focus on your agents by investing in agent training, employee welfare and engagement. It’s also important to incentivize growth and improvement and offer clear career progression frameworks.

Some other best practices involve creating clear, structured workflows to maximize efficiency. Use automation tools and other technology to aid your employees while improving productivity. Also, keep an eye on your call center metrics and KPIs to ensure consistency and high customer satisfaction.

What Are Some Essential Call Center Metrics?

Customer satisfaction, first response time, customer effort score, net promoter score, agent attrition rates and average call handling times are some common and important call center metrics to keep track of.

Call center metrics are objective data points that help you measure your call center’s overall performance and potential for growth. They also help you measure agent performance and productivity and offer appropriate incentives. You can read our guide to call center metrics and KPIs for a more in-depth view of this topic.

What Is Call Center Management Software?

Call center software helps streamline and supervise the day to day operations of a call center. It allows agents to handle calls more systematically and collaboratively, and enables supervisors to monitor service quality more easily.

Programs like RingCentral, Cisco and Avaya come with tools like dialers, call routing capabilities, voice intelligence and workforce management to help create an all-in-one solution that manages various essential processes

How Do I Select a Call Center Management System?

There are a number of factors that you should weigh when selecting the right call center management system for your needs. The first and foremost is whether your call center handles mainly inbound traffic or outbound traffic. This will help you figure out which features and tools you need to prioritize in your call center software.

For example, an inbound call center will need robust auto-attendant and call routing tools while an outbound call center will want to focus on having a range of different auto-dialers.

Some other factors to consider are deployment methods and whether you want cloud deployment or on-premise installation. Budgetary concerns and industry-specific requirements are some other points to consider. Our call center software requirements checklist can be a useful resource for you in creating your own list of requirements and concerns.

Still feeling overwhelmed? SelectHub experts are here to help! Reach out to our team for personalized recommendations and guidance in your software selection journey. You can contact us by email at [email protected] or via phone at 855-850-3850.