CCaaS (Contact Center as a Service)

18 Contact Center Strategies That Actually Work

Contact centers are the conversation hubs of a business that faces an immense flurry of activity every single day. Some days are good, others not so much. Every call representative has their own challenges and wins.

So how can your business, in such a situation, ensure that your contact center is functioning optimally? The best way is to work with industry-tested strategies that have proven themselves time and again.

In this blog, we discuss the 18 crucial contact center strategies your business must work on to improve contact center performance.

18 Contact Center Strategies for Improving Business Performance

Below are 18 strategies you can follow to improve your business performance.

1. Know What Your Customers Want

What do your customers really want? In addition to excellent products and services, your business needs to communicate that it values its customers. Contact centers are the best medium of communicating this to your customers to help improve the CSAT score and contact center performance.

All an average customer wants from calling your contact center is to resolve their query. Work on methods that allow you to resolve customer queries as quickly as possible without having to make them wait any longer than they have to.

You can create self-service menus, instant messaging-based self-services (like WhatsApp or SMS), a knowledge base, voice assistants, etc., to get the job done.

Remember, the customer who doesn’t have to wait to get an answer is a happy customer – and success for your contact center.

 2. Create Ideal Customer Personas

Creating an ideal customer persona is one of the most important aspects of sealing a successful sale, especially where a contact center is involved.

Knowing your target audience helps your sales representatives improvise the conversations to the business’s benefit. It helps your businesses understand what a customer needs to know about your products to choose them over your competitors.

Essentially, creating an ideal customer persona is about knowing how to sell to each customer individually by working out how they would respond to your initiations. Focus on answering questions like the following:

  • How exactly can your product solve a unique problem for your ideal customer?
  • How will this product improve their quality of life?

Look at the product from the customers’ point of view to better model your contact center scripts.

 3. Work on Service Quality

Even if you get all the other aspects of your contact center right, if the service quality isn’t good, you are going to frustrate your customers. It is essential to look at the problems at your contact center in a multifaceted way:

  • Issues that employees and staff face
  • Issues that customers face
  • Issues with technology
  • Issues with outsourced services

Create a list of all the problems that can compromise the service quality that your contact center provides. You can consider conducting a root cause analysis at your contact center to identify where the issues are arising from.

It is important to curtail any practices that are creating operational issues downstream.

 4. Implement AI for Insights

The best thing you can do to create a digital contact center strategy is to equip your facility with intelligent, AI-based solutions.

AI is everywhere today, and there is a reason for it. These technologies are proactive and autonomous to a certain extent, helping you expedite your operations backed with data-heavy insights.

They can be effectively leveraged for data management of your call center, helping to democratize customer information for all the call center agents.

You can also utilize AI for more complex tasks like automatically creating cohorts, quality assurance, analytics, call monitoring, logging and tagging, customer attributions, emotional analysis, agent monitoring, and much more.

5. Create Policies, SOPs, and Benchmarks

A clear set of instructions and policies is necessary for any machinery or operation to execute flawlessly.

The same concept applies to your contact center strategies as well.

Before you even decide to invest in creating a call center, your policies and protocol should be in place. Contact center policies help define the culture, philosophies, and ethics that the call center representatives need to embody.

It helps keep the conversations with customers in line with the brand identity and voice.

Standardization of operating protocol helps customer representatives give directions to a call and close more deals in favor. Standard Operating Protocol (SOP) helps the representatives know what to do in various situations.

6. Work on Employee Productivity and Contact Center Efficiency

Employee productivity is directly related to the quality of the output. High productivity drives better performance and keeps the thrill of calling alive.

A productive contact center handles more calls per day, the bottom line compounded by the individual productivity of each employee.

One of the ways you can facilitate employee productivity is by introducing healthy competition and providing your staff with the tools and software essential to manage their workloads. You can also consider adding collaboration tools to save time that knowledge transfer takes when one customer is handed over to a different rep.

Focusing on effective training can also help equip your employees with the knowledge they need to manage their work and performance better.

7. Adopt Automation

Automation isn’t a choice today; it has become a necessity. The fact that automating the repetitive, mundane tasks at your contact center can help save time for every sales representative is reason enough to invest in it.

This is because customer expectations from a business have increased, and you need to ensure that your business can provide a human representative to the genuinely troubled callers.

Automated call routing, queue management, and self-service desk help take some workload off of your employees. It gives them the breathing room to prepare for more calls while maintaining high levels of service at the same time.

8. Keep Your Workforce Interested and Engaged

Think of engagement this way: if you enjoy what you do, wouldn’t that help you deliver higher quality and better products to clients?

The same logic, when applied to contact centers, tells you why ensuring that your workforce is engaged is important.

You can drive workforce engagement by including modules in your onboarding and training programs or providing them with interesting work-related activities to do. You can experiment with gamified dashboards or interfaces that keep things interesting for your workforce.

A healthy teamwork-based competition can help drive more engagement and productivity out of your workforce.

9. Don’t Just Gather Customer Feedback: Deliver Results

One of the key mistakes businesses make when garnering customer feedback is not to deliver on it. While engaging in a survey or feedback form, there is only one thought in the customers’ heads: “Would I see any improvement in services if I give this feedback?”

Asking for feedback on the quality of calls and assistance also comes attached with endeavoring to work on the feedback received. If the customers aren’t satisfied, you can perform a root cause analysis again and discover what is compromising the service levels.

10. Undertake a SWOT Analysis

SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. This analysis helps a business get a holistic picture of where it stands with a particular aspect or operation.

In this case, a SWOT analysis of your contact center will help bring the following information to light:

  • What your business is already excelling at (like query resolution)
  • The areas that need attention and improvement (like resource-restricted growing workforce)
  • The imminent opportunities that will help your business become better (like the availability of productivity software)
  • What impediments can slow your progress down or steal your customers away (like customer churn)

11. Address Recurring Issues

Every business has a unique product, and this uniqueness generates recurring issues (or repeat queries) that a large chunk of your audience asks. A great contact center strategy deals with these recurring issues by pinning them to the wall and creating standardized responses for them.

Not only does this help your representatives save time on call, but it also ensures that the customers don’t have to wait in a queue for a question that has already been answered a thousand times before.

This helps to reduce the call volumes and workloads of your employees drastically.

You can even consider automating the responses to these repeat questions to further filter out these calls.

12. Leverage Successful Call Scripts

Every call center has a list of calls that were extremely successful, some that were okay, and quite a few that failed at closing a deal. Document your success and failure calls to highlight two things for your sales representatives:

  • What to learn from successful calls
  • How to prevent a conversation from leading to definite failure

In the learning resources section of your call center, you can place these documented scripts for your customer service representatives to refer to when handling difficult calls.

You can further categorize the scripts to help with a more extensive training session.

13. Arrange Information or Entertainment for Queued Callers

What do your callers do while they wait? After a few seconds, every beep and screech on the customer service line begins to annoy the customer more.

While your customers wait, giving them something to listen to is a good strategy. When your customers have something to do, you can drastically reduce the call abandonment rates.

For example, many contact centers employ a selection of soothing music to help alleviate any harsh moods that a customer might be calling in. 

Although, it is important to keep in mind that this strategy is not a replacement for long queue times. If your contact center is going over the industry standard in waiting times, there could be other problems to address first.

14. Invest in a Modern IVR

IVR stands for Interactive Voice Response. It is one of the most coveted and popular technologies that almost every contact center employs.

IVRs offer your customers interactive self-service Tele assistance that lets them navigate the knowledge base and resolve their queries. It helps to save your call reps’ time and reduces customer frustration from having to wait in a queue when their query is a basic one.

An advanced IVR can function not through keypresses but through voice commands (like Siri or Alexa). Many IVR technologies offer semantics and NLP-based query resolution tools that help them understand the context of a query, regardless of how a question was asked.

15. Hire The Right Hands

When a business hires hands to work in the contact center, it majorly considers the capability of the candidate to explain the product well. While it is important to know the product information like the back of their hands, something more is needed.

The candidates must also possess a driving focus toward service. This trait is what makes them proactive and go the extra mile to make the customers feel valued.

Hiring candidates that have a knack for service is the best fit. You can always train them in your products while onboarding.

16. Leverage Skill-Based Routing

One of the most important things you can do to ensure customer satisfaction from your contact center is to apply skill-based routing.

You should create a skills matrix that lists the capacities of each agent and their suitability for certain levels of complexity. When you feed this data into intelligent contact center software, it can then assess the complexity of the call based on selected parameters and route it to the agent most qualified to handle it.

17. Engage in Routine Audits of Contact Center Performance

Contact center audits help you understand where your facility is performing well and where there is scope for improvement. It also takes into account if you are staying compliant with consumer privacy guidelines regarding data protection.

To that end, a routine audit of your facility highlights how your business needs to prepare for the future by considering the following:

  • The growth rate of business
  • Staffing situation
  • Market and competitor trends
  • Technological rearrangements

Audits must be mandated as a way of giving yourself a reality check.

18. Select The Right Software

Last but not least, you must carefully consider the contact center software you deploy at your facility. The choice should be driven by the following factors:

  • The needs of your contact center
  • The workflows that your employees use
  • Your budget
  • Average daily call volume
  • Projected growth and corresponding requirements
  • Deployment mode and methods

And any other specific requirements of your business. The safe choice is to go for an all-needs-met solution like JustCall, which offers comprehensive features like multi-level IVR, conversation coaching, conversation intelligence, sales dialler, SMS bots, and much more.

It helps to make your operations smoother and more efficient.

Wrapping Up

Contact center strategies are only as good as their implementation. The list of 18 strategies above is just a rough guideline of how the performance of your contact center can be boosted.

Use this guide to restructure how your call center operates. To know how JustCall can help you bring about this transformation, visit the website.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the main goal of a contact center?

The main goal of a contact center is to provide customers with any technical assistance or guidance they need for using your products. It also focuses on sales support and delivering value to customers.

How to improve the contact center?

You can improve the performance of your contact center by adopting market-tested strategies, best practices, the right workforce, and technology at your facility.

How is a contact center successful?

Effective communication is the key driver of contact center success. If your service agents are able to provide the right and timely service to the customers, your contact center can be successful.

What is the concept of a modern contact center?

A modern contact center is omnichannel, unified, democratized, and efficient. It employs modern technologies to provide better customer service and improve agent productivity. It helps the business close more sales.

What are the three pillars of contact center management?

The three important pillars of contact center management are:

  • Brand experience
  • Customer experience
  • Product experience

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the main goal of a contact center?

The main goal of a contact center is to provide customers with any technical assistance or guidance they need for using your products. It also focuses on sales support and delivering value to customers.

How to improve the contact center?

You can improve the performance of your contact center by adopting market-tested strategies, best practices, the right workforce, and technology at your facility.

How is a contact center successful?

Effective communication is the key driver of contact center success. If your service agents are able to provide the right and timely service to the customers, your contact center can be successful.

What is the concept of a modern contact center?

A modern contact center is omnichannel, unified, democratized, and efficient. It employs modern technologies to provide better customer service and improve agent productivity. It helps the business close more sales.

What are the three pillars of contact center management?

The three important pillars of contact center management are:

  • Brand experience
  • Customer experience
  • Product experience

Vijaya heads the Global Support team at JustCall, where he has played a pivotal role in expanding the support team and diversifying its channels and services. Under his guidance, the team consistently earns top customer satisfaction scores. With a passion for team-building, Vijaya is committed to empowering his staff to deliver unparalleled customer experiences. In addition to his managerial responsibilities, he is a certified Leadership Coach, specializing in helping leaders overcome their unique challenges to achieve success.

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