When we sit down to discuss the needs of our call centre clients, the discussion is always around “how do we improve our service levels and quality of service without having to spend a huge sum or increase the number of staff on the floor? How do we better manage the staff we have, help them improve, reduce our staff turnover and report on all of this to senior management?
The Call centre floor should be seen as more than a cost of doing business. IT is the one department that faces your clients and are your greatest asset in delivering the ability to grow profits, maintain customers, increase loyalty and get people talking about your company.
So being able to closely monitor and manage staff through the learning cycle that assists them to become the best agent they can be which in turn includes improving sales, service or support to the customers they interact with, enables you as a manager to see a call centre floor as not a cost centre, but a profit centre in any organisation by allowing you to have it operate under a “one voice” ethos.
Taking the “one voice” approach is to take your call centre to a unified message, spread through a unified approach but individualised with the personality of the team members delivering the services over the phone to your customers.
Below is a checklist of the 5 TOP TOOLS for CALL CENTRES that will change the way you do business and deliver results!
Call Recording, Review and Monitoring Tools
In the world of call centres and contact centres, call recording and monitoring play not only a key part in coaching and managing staff performance, but also, when done with the right software and format assist in PCI Compliant specification required by larger organisations. There are a variety of tools and software available to do this which vary from voice recording through to voice & screen recording so you can see on screen behaviours associated to handling caller inquiries.
These tools assist in reducing or managing customer complaints, misunderstandings, disputes & debt collections by enabling a customer interaction to be searched for and found, then played back so that the real story of what happened can be understood. This in itself shortens the timeframe for resolving these common issues in call centre environments as well as allow you to understand the ongoing training needs of your customer service agents and where the vast number of improvements can be delivered by individuals or teams. These tools are also amazing coaching tools as a call played back can be a quick learning tool for an agent to understand how they could have done things differently in just about any scenario.
Quality Management and assurance tools
It is of greatest importance in any call centre telephony delivery to have the ability to continually identify improvement opportunities and deficiencies in current work practices so as to be best able to develop the skills of your call centre agents. It is easy to understand that the best customer service comes from agents performing at their highest standard. Good quality management tools allow supervisors to mark and asses their agents and deliver timely feedback in a format simply understood allowing for ongoing coaching and training to be focused on needs as well as giving agents the ability to improve as time goes on. This can be linked to Coaching and learning tools discussed later.
Real-time Reporting and Analytics
There is nothing more transparent than great reporting, and senior management love nothing more than dashboards full of great data, weekly scorecards and collated reports that give a crystal clear picture of the performance of your team. This is the information that links senior management to agents. By empowering you entire team and the agents with benchmarks for performance and tools where they can assess themselves against their peers will not only drive automatic improvements in agent performance, but give management the tools to understand what is happening in their teams and the ability to plan training outcomes specific to individuals and groups alike. Call analytics will enable you to start to recognise the differences between the behaviours of High performers vs the agents with the greatest need to improve and from there, it is all improvement!
E-Learning & Coaching Tools
With access to Call recording, call monitoring, Quality Management and reporting with analytics, the e-learning tools enable you to create customised training for each agent based on their score cards, call handling, and recording so you can help them help themselves to improve. You can utilise extracts from your highest performers for the learner to listen and learn from, create multiple choice learning checks to ensure that the product and company policy knowledge is up to date. You can deliver them reading material to quiz later or to use in focus groups to enable staff with all the tools that the best in class use, all with the click of the button, all trackable and manageable.
Remote and Mobile Access to your Contact Centre
No supervisor is bolted to their desk, and they are usually on the move! Having 24/7 access to the call centre operations and stats enables quick and real time decisions to be made. You need to make all of these decisions if you are in meetings, on training or travelling for business, even when you are on leave! Simple overviews and stats available to you on a laptop, tablet or smart device can give you assurance or the tools you need to keep you call centre at its peak. The other tools utilised in a remote management solution can also be alerts so that if certain thresholds or alarms are triggered in the systems you will be able to have these delivered as an automated email.
Managing any call centre is a big task. Trying to manage it without call recording, call monitoring, quality assessments, analytics or eLearning tools make it an even bigger challenge. Access to all of these tools delivers a sustainable business model that enables you to deliver great results from great staff who are able to develop within their role knowing they are being mentored and trained to be the best they can be. You need these tools and we can help you find them!
Call Com2 today on 1300 887 495
by John Boshier – System Designer & Director @ Com2 Communications
August 2014
