Call centers Challenges
Today's Call centers addresses the management and agent perspective, best practices and insights on building a world-class customer service organisation using knowledge base applications.
With increased pressure to remain competitive and cut costs while providing premium customer service, companies are expecting more every day from their call centers operations. Agents often find themselves in the middle of content overload: product information, marketing promotions, support documents, procedures and reporting, customer data, and more.
The moment call centers agents are outnumbered by the volume of calls they receive each day, a large volume of unanswered inquiries, dropped calls and frustrated customers on hold is the undesirable result. With cloud-based customer service solutions, however, these bugaboos can be eliminated and a better, more streamlined approach to customer service can be implemented. Call centers can serve as a company’s garbage disposal unit experts estimate that less than five percent of all call inquiries are positive remarks on the company’s services.
A lack of Accountability can have many different looks, but here is a description of one of the most common set of circumstances we see. In general, agents “do their thing”. Supervisors put out fires and keep everyone updated on the numbers, and most of their time is spent solving floor problems, doing reports and participating in meetings.
The Core Problem would be with everyone being so busy doing the same old thing; no one is pushing the floor to do its best. Everybody is too busy to stop and change things for the better. By this time, many bad habits have developed at the agent and supervisor levels that there are no simple answers. The call centers will have a hard time digging itself out of the hole.
Every call centers knows exactly how long the supervisor is required to be on the floor each day in a coaching capacity, but few provide any coaching at all. We find that as little as 5% of a supervisor’s time is spent floor-coaching. What are they doing instead?
The Call centers Floor Management Workshop Changes Paradigms
Centers with this Challenge are screaming for a paradigm shift, one that presents floor coaching in a positive light, which is where it should have always been.
When there are no Quality Assurance personnel, supervisors do their own observation work. This is usually done by listening to banks of recorded calls and scoring them. Unfortunately, this takes so long that supervisors run out of time and do not give the feedback and coaching to the agents.
The problem here is more than just a lack of time. Listening to calls is an antiquated way to find coaching opportunities. Supervisors usually have to listen to entire calls because they never know when a coaching opportunity is going to surface. If a center does not invest in the staff or technology needed to complete all these observations effectively, the problem will continue to get worse.
