9 Best Call Center Script Practices For Your Contact Center

Therefore, organizations must adopt the best call center script practices to give agents the right direction for meaningful customer interactions.   

What are call center scripts? 

A call center script is pre-recorded information intended to help agents solve customer problems. It enables agents to identify the cause of customers’ problems and find relevant information fastly and efficiently in compliance with the Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs).   

Why are call center scripts important? 

If created in the right way, contact center scripts can help organizations with: 

• Make support teams mistake-proof: Call center scripts for agents to act as a definitive reference source, guiding support teams with the next best action to take during a customer interaction. A guided framework avoids confusion and creates mistake-proof customer service.
• Create consistent customer experiences: Contact center scripts bring all the agents on the same page with a unified knowledge repository to handle customer queries.  
• Reduce call handling time: With improved access to actionable information, each call’s average handle time (AHT) is reduced as agents save valuable time, otherwise spent profusely searching for relevant information and talking to team members. 
• Boosts support team productivity: Contact center scripts boost agents’ confidence to handle diverse customer service issues and help new agents with a ready reference for relevant information from the get-go.  

9 Best call center script practices

50% of the customers feel there is a major need for companies to improve their customer service quality. Customers prefer talking to knowledgeable, confident, and courteous agents who value their time and get them to solutions quickly and efficiently. 

Here are the 9 best call center script practices to manage customer expectations.  

1. Hire the right call center agents 

• 68% of the customers believe the key to great customer service is a polite customer service agent. Creating call center scripts for agents is not enough to deliver adequate customer service. Instead, contact center scripts, and the right support staff works together to take customers conveniently through their journey. 

• Therefore, the first step is to identify and hire the right agents who can adequately comply with call center scripts and contribute to making them better in response to the rising customer service needs.  

2. Write multiple possible scenarios in every script 

• Before creating call center scripts, it is crucial to study customer journeys to identify their challenges and script them in the right format to help agents resolve those issues adequately. 

• Sometimes, customers cannot communicate the exact challenge confronting them and come up with newer issues during their interaction with agents. Being prepared with multiple possibilities is the mark of an effective call center script.

• With a call center scripting software like Knowmax, any number of customer problems can be organized into intuitive workflows without the need for any code or technical expertise. These workflows guide agents with the next best action steps to quickly identify and fix the problem while engaging the customer in the entire troubleshooting process. 

3. Add visual simulators

• A suitable picture in the right place can do the work of a thousand words combined. Adding visual simulators with text augments supports teams‘ efficiency in guiding customers to resolve their issues. 

• With call scripting software like Knowmax, admins can add picture guides with the troubleshooting workflow steps and within articles, increasing the speed and accuracy of telephone scripts in delivering superior customer service. 

4. Use scripts to train agents 

• Training agents should not be seen as a one-time process. It is essential to regularly train agents and update them timely with the new product updates and best practices. 

• The Knowmax Knowledge management platform centralizes information into a unified place, and the semantic search function understands the search intent to deliver relevant information fastly. 

• With an accessible Knowledge base, organizations can reduce the training time of new agents by providing them with a ready reference of relevant information while also enabling other agents to bank on a unified knowledge resource for continuous learning. 

• An effective call center script is one that can enrich agents with the most relevant and updated knowledge and train them continually to deliver adequate customer service. 

5. Use personalization 

• Given the infinite options customers have today, the only way to retain them is by offering personalization. 80% of the customers like to buy from a company that provides tailored experiences. 

• AI-backed call scripting software like Knowmax, workflow steps can be integrated with APIs to fetch customer data from CRM platforms, so customers do not have to repeat the information the company already possesses. 

• An integrated call center script helps agents customize customer experiences and arrive at the solution quickly and efficiently, resulting in lower average handle time (AHT) and higher first call resolution (FCR). 

6. Add important information and tips to aid compliance

• Even the most detailed workflows and articles need support information to ensure agents follow all the steps correctly. A call center script must enable an efficient interlinking of information for agents to find all the relevant information from a single dashboard.

• While creating call flow scripts for agents on the Knowmax platform, guidance tips can be added to the workflow steps, and additional information can be added in the form of quick notes. External text and video files can be uploaded to assist agents in diagnosing the problems faster in compliance with company SOPs. 

• Providing relevant information at every step in a call center script enables agents to meet their targets and deliver meaningful customer experiences. 

7. Turn scripts into searchable knowledge resources 

• A contact center script without a seamless search is less than helpful, even if it contains all relevant information. Customers demand instant answers, and a call center script should act as more than a static knowledge resource to help agents find the relevant information without any hassle. 

• Knowmax Knowledge Management solution enables in-document keyword search to help agents retrieve relevant information faster, removing the need to maneuver through the entire article manually. The auto-tagging function helps identify content modules, enabling agents to locate the information more quickly from a pool of information stored in the knowledge base. 

• The bottom line is to turn call center scripts into searchable knowledge resources that agents can bank on to deliver satisfactory customer experiences. 

8. Track the performance regularly 

• Call center scripts should be seen as a work in progress with the need to track the effectiveness of scripts in achieving success metrics. 

• For that, organizations need to have the technological sophistication to measure the performance of call center scripts regularly and adequately.

• With a full-suite knowledge base management platform like Knowmax, admins can assess the resourcefulness of call center scripts with micro-segmented analytics. The analytics function furnishes timely content performance reports and provides actionable insights to optimize the call center scripts to meet the evolving customer requirements. 

9. Encourage agent feedback and implement it

• Agents are the direct users of contact center scripts, and paying heed to their voices can encourage their participation in upgrading the quality of content.

• With the Knowmax knowledge Management solution, agents can rate the effectiveness of workflow scripts and input their suggestions to be shared with supervisors. 

• The admins can communicate with agents in real-time and acknowledge their feedback. Actively implementing agent feedback is crucial to developing highly effective and functional call center scripts. 

Conclusion

Creating an effective call center script & following best practices is only the first step. Every organization has its dynamics that should be considered while developing agent scripts for BPOs. 

However, at the heart of a robust contact center script is the ability to create, organize, manage and measure the information consistently to help agents find the relevant information at the right time to deliver high-touch customer services.