Your contact centre is often the first interaction a customer will have with your business. Their experience will both reflect your brand and influence your future relationship with them, so getting it right is key to the success of your business.
Contact centres evolve at a fast pace and keeping up with your competitors is another factor in your success. According to ContactBabel, there are more than 4,000 contact centres in the UK employing over three-quarters of a million staff.
Facts, figures and feedback
Management information (MI) is crucial to a contact centre. Understanding call volumes, response rates and how effectively queries are being resolved is key to ensuring you can make reactive changes where necessary and predict future trends so that you can proactively plan your strategy.
Statistics about your agents’ performance can also help to highlight any training needs or where an employee simply is not performing in the role.
In addition to answering inbound customer queries, it is important to gather feedback from them about how you are performing and how things could be improved. The opportunity to provide this feedback can give your customers a sense of being invested in your brand.
Technology
A primary consideration in most of our lives these days, both business and personal, is technology. In a lot of areas, it makes our lives simpler and quicker, and it is no different for a contact centre.
What types of technology should a contact centre consider? Probably the primary consideration for most centres is its telephony system, which needs to be reliable and cost-effective. For over a decade businesses have been able to consider voice over internet protocol (VoIP) systems alongside standard analogue. Companies such as that are a wholesale VoIP termination provider can supply communications for your business.
Customer relationship management (CRM) software is another consideration for a contact centre. This software enables a business to get a single view of its customers in addition to creating call out lists for staff, tracking correspondence and managing service tickets.
Finally, the third area in which technology can improve your contact centre operation is in scheduling staff. Workforce management software can help you to more accurately predict peaks and troughs in call volumes and ensure staff are on hand at the right time.
