Call centers are centralized office spaces that are used mainly for receiving and transmitting large number of inquiries made by telephone. They may either be inbound or outbound or they can be both. While inbound deals with getting calls from current customers, outbound is about making outgoing calls to potential ones.
Call center services include those offered by different companies and agencies such as telemarketing and teleservices operators. They can be used to provide answers to queries about a company’s product and services and to provide support for customers. They may also be set up for political or charitable donations.
Call centers provide a way for customers to reach a business and vice versa. They can also be a way to reach new clients and extend the company’s reach in the market. They essentially serve as an extension of a business. You can learn more about them here.
An important part of a call center is its monitoring. A good monitoring strategy helps to improve customer service and satisfaction, employee retention as well as income. Even at this, it can be quite tricky to implement.
Monitoring involves the sustained process of collecting data, analyzing it and providing feedback. These can include how efficient agents are, the time spent on attending to a client, the quality of the calls, etc. All these can be achieved using a suitable software.
The insights gleaned from this data will then be used to help in making decisions and to implement necessary changes. This can apply to both inbound and outbound centers.
Benefits of Monitoring
Monitoring is all about improving services and making a success of your operations. The resultant effect of this is as below.
Better Quality of Service
Improved service quality should be the goal of any monitoring operation or strategy. This improvement may be qualitative or quantitative. Quantitative includes handling more calls, handling more support queries, or closing an increased number of sales.
Qualitative may include resolving the issue in less time which indicates efficiency. This is important because when customers get their queries resolved on time, they will likely continue to patronize your business.
Furthermore, it can be to reduce the average waiting time before calls are accepted or the rate by which they are abandoned. Additionally, it can help to measure and improve the average time that a missed call is responded to.
Improved Customer Satisfaction
Naturally, improved quality of service results in better customer experience and ultimately better satisfaction. By monitoring the way service is rendered and improving where there are loopholes, you ensure that your customers stay contented.
Two metrics that may be used to monitor customer satisfaction include Net Promoter Score and Average Call Duration. You may learn about net Promoter Score here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Promoter. These two will reveal to you how efficient your team is as they interact with customers. You should also take note of the time taken to route a call to an agent as well as other metrics.
Customer experience is a huge part of any business entity and you want yours to be positive and not negative. Satisfied customers mean continuous business. It could also mean more business as they will tell others about your company.
Consistency is the key to customer satisfaction. This means that when a certain level of quality of service has been attained, it must be maintained. It must be an improvement if it has to change at all.
Increased Employee Retention
Given how much time and money it takes to hire and train employees, it is top priority to retain them. Alas, this often is not the case. With proper monitoring you will get insights into the performance of your employees.
This helps to gauge their skill level as well as morale. With this, you can tailor any training to the needs of your team. This will help to retain as many team members as possible.
Getting a Monitoring Software
To ensure an effective monitoring, you need the right set of tools. A lot of monitoring is still done by humans but there is dedicated software that may be used. The software can handle the recording process and data analysis while humans handle the decision-making.
You should bear in mind the factors below in choosing a call center quality monitoring software:
- The software should have the features you need and can take care of your call center size
- It must be easy to use
- It should be scalable. That is, it should be useful even when your business needs change.
- It should be secure.
Conclusion
Monitoring your call center activities is important for customer satisfaction and your business growth. There are several metrics you can look out for but to do this effectively, you need to have the right tools. A good software will help you achieve this.