The call center industry has seen a soaring rise after foreign multinational companies brought job opportunities and set foot on the land.
A call center is a large centralized work area that handles a large number of requests such as customer queries related to a company or product.
The essence of a call center lies in the quality of customer service it delivers that can be enhanced using technologies like IVR.
However, the traditional call center industry has seen a transformation, with the change in technology. A traditional call center would have a large number of employees calling the customers monotonously using large wired telephony systems such as PBX.
But ever since IVR and toll-free numbers came into play, the recipe for a higher customer satisfaction has become easier. Interactive Voice Responses interact with the customers by DTMF tones or recognizing the voice.
It responds to a customer’s query by pre-recorded voice or audio that is dynamically generated to guide the customer to proceed with the next steps.
In order to maintain the proper functioning and eminence of a call center, it thus becomes necessary to improve and enhance its quality on a regular basis.
Here are a few tips that will help you enhance your call center’s quality using one the latest trends in technology that is Interactive Voice Response:
IVR works on a telephone menu system that segments and routes the callers to the most appropriate members of your team that is specialized to handle the customer’s issue.
Incorporation of an IVR in a call center would put its most important function of call routing to best use.
The built-in control accessibilities of an IVR collects the information from the customer through voice or numeric controls and skilfully routes the call to self-service steps or the dedicated customer service agent.
Most of the times customers have to listen to the endless music while waiting for their call to connect to the representative. This leads to frustration in the customer due to long queues, even though their query might be simple.
With the help IVR for call centers, answering to simple issues of the customer such as their order status or account credit can be efficiently automated. This would save a lot of time of the customer as well as the time of the call center support staff.
Customer support staff represent the company, thus it is a necessary condition that the representatives must be trained well enough before they actually interact with the customer.
All the representatives must have a complete knowledge of the company policies and process for which they are working. Deficient or incomplete information may lead to unsatisfactory answers to the customer, ultimately damaging the customer experience and reputation of the company.
An intensive training is recommended to the customer support staff before they go live with the customer, to prevent the company’s image from tarnishing.
Monitoring the calls of the customer support representatives is an important step towards the enhancement of call center quality. IVR lends a helping hand by saving time that was earlier required by an entire dedicated quality department to monitor the calls.
And now, just one person can inspect the agent’s calls, thus efficiently save time and money.
Call centers can also adapt IVR to automate personalized calls to the customers. This would make the customer feel more comfortable and drawn towards your business.
By throwing in some basic speech commands to your IVR, it can be diligently modified to greet customers by their names.
For example, when a customer calls, an IVR might respond this way, “Hello [name], how may I help you today?” or “Are you calling regarding your bill that is 4 days past due?”
Since IVR is based on cloud storage, it has access to the largest database of customer information. Subsequently, it can be used to create personalized chat or emails for the customer to provide a sense of warmth and care.
Just as essential it is to monitor the calls of representatives, it is equally important to have a performance indicator in your organization.
Also known as key performance indicators (KPI), these access your business’s performance on a greater level. It is a kind of a business metric that is crucial to monitor various parameters responsible for the success of your business.
For example analyzing parameters such as call abandon rates, monetary cost per call, the number of first call resolution, queue time, and call completion rate are requisite for enhancement of the quality of your call center.
Image Source: Call-Center-Metrics
Another key factor for the enhancement of your call center quality is a reduction of the call hold times. Imagine yourself as a customer calling for assistance.
It is obvious that you would like to get your resolution at an earliest and would not prefer someone who puts your call on hold, endlessly. This is a similar case with all the customers approaching call centers for help and support.
Therefore, only an efficiently trained representative along with IVR support can help the customer in providing an early resolution to their query, by reducing the waiting time.
The quality of your call center directly speaks for your ongoing business. If the customer gets a desired solution or resolution for their problems, the reputation and friendliness of your company go up.
Analysis should be done at regular intervals to get an insight into your business statistics. The quality of your call center can be enhanced by the appropriate analysis of this data and motivation of your employees.
Emphasize on growth and keep your representatives updated with the changing company policies. Thus, customer satisfaction should be the utmost priority of your call center for success.