Call center efficiency: three rules to add value to your customer service

Customer service is a part of every business: if you want your company to thrive, it either needs to establish an in-house call center or outsource its customer service activities to a service provider. To put it simply, you need to increase your call center efficiency.

Having a company focusing on call center activities can be challenging: the operations are extremely costly, and to most people they don’t seem to be a good source of revenue. So the question is: is it possible to make your call center business a profitable activity? Well, it all comes down to your approach. By following these three simple rules below, you can add more value to your customer service and boost your call center efficiency.

Balance call center efficiency and quality

As everyone knows, call centers are often used to handle customer service activities, offering support to customers and aiming to ensure a high level of customer experience satisfaction in your organization. However, although customer service should always focus on quality, call centers often tend to shift their focus to quantity over quality. Since running a call center is costly, companies put too much emphasis on efficiency, and try to cut call center costs by setting impossible targets for their agents. But is it really worth trying to cut down on expenses at all costs? The answer is, without doubt, NO.

Just walk into any call center, and you’ll see inspirational quotes on the walls, saying such things as “You Can Do Better”. However, setting unrealistic targets puts an enormous stress on your agents to hit their KPIs at the expense of providing quality customer service.

So, instead of pushing your agents to process as many customers as they can, try and concentrate instead on customers’ needs by offering them the best customer service you can. As you will see, it works miracles – your clients will be impressed by the excellent customer service you provide for their customers, as after all, your call center is the face of their business.

Plus, providing excellent customer experience is one of the best ways to acquire new clients, and will also help your agents up-sell or cross-sell products. All you have to do is to find the optimum way to balance quality and efficiency.

(Here are some pro tips on how to measure your call center’s efficiency. Just don’t forget about the balance!)

Learn from customers’ feedback

Customer calls provide some of the most valuable information for your call center. True, you may need to invest in your call center, but in return, it will provide you with a goldmine of information. So don’t miss out on the opportunity to collect customer data and use it for product and process improvements. 

For instance, if you run telesales campaigns in your call center, you’ll probably accumulate valuable information regarding your products’ and services’ sales performance. So why not start to analyze this information? If some of the products aren’t performing well, you can simply use customer data to help introduce improvements based on it. This approach will definitely help you boost your call center efficiency.

Lastly, as we already talked about it in our previous blog post, never underestimate the power of customer reviews. Nobody likes dealing with complaining clients, but it’s worth the extra effort. It’s always a good idea to focus especially on complaints when monitoring customer calls. By using customer feedback to improve your services, you’ll be one step ahead of the competition. Don’t forget about this fact when claiming your call center is just a cost center.

Take advantage of technology

Technology is advancing at lightning speed, and changing the world around us every day. And it’s no different in the call center business: year after year, better and better state-of-the-art technology tools enter the market. And, as we mentioned above, although improving call center efficiency is usually the main goal, one thing is sure: pushing your agents too much won’t help you, but using reliable and up-to-date technology tools will definitely make a difference.

Amongst other things, a reliable call center software is fundamental to any well-run call center. Software options these days come with extremely smart features, such as a predictive dialer, CRM integration, or call blending (you can read about the benefits of call blending here).

These powerful features will definitely help you to boost your productivity and increase your sales without causing too many issues with your agents, for instance allowing you to set your inbound calls to take priority over outbound calls (or vice versa). This is just one aspect of how a top-quality call center software can help you improve your call center efficiency. If you’re searching for a reliable call center software containing all the features necessary for a seamless call center operation, then check out what we can offer here.

The appropriate technology will also help you make the most of customer data, which as we stated above is more relevant than ever in the call center business. By using such technology, you can create real-time statistics, which will be essential to help monitor and evaluate your performance.

In brief, technology tools will definitely bring you changes for the better – but only if you’re ready to use the customer data you collect.

So, as you can see, providing excellent customer experience is a challenging job. But if you try and balance quality and call center efficiency, learn from customer feedback, and leverage technology tools, your efforts will pay off.