Tip 1: Take care of your advisors
A contact center fundamentally relies on its team of advisors, who have one of the most challenging jobs imaginable. These individuals not only represent your brand daily but also face the direct brunt of customer grievances—whether it’s an issue with a product like phone X’s battery or an erroneous bill, the advisor often becomes the scapegoat.
Handling call after call, this relentless pressure can significantly affect advisors’ morale. It’s essential for call center customer service excellence that these advisors feel appreciated, recognized, and valued. Improving the well-being of your call center staff is crucial to enhancing overall customer service. The level of service your customers experience is directly tied to how valued your employees feel.
This challenge is particularly tough in a profession where the compensation often doesn’t reflect the skills and dedication required. With limited scope to adjust remuneration packages, it becomes vital to offer recognition in other forms. Support, coaching, and training can empower advisors to develop and advance within the organization, creating a more positive work environment that benefits both employees and customers.
Tip 2: Hire “good” managers
Improving call center customer service also hinges on hiring effective managers. Contact center supervisors are essential for developing and motivating their teams, providing individual coaching to advisors, and helping each team member perform at their best.
Anyone who has worked as an advisor in a contact center can attest that their job satisfaction, motivation, and productivity greatly depend on the quality of their relationship with their supervisor. The managerial skills of these supervisors critically influence the professional experiences, productivity, and advancement of advisors.
To effectively carry out their coaching duties, supervisors should manage a reasonable number of advisors. In outsourcing firms and large organizations, it’s typical to have one supervisor for every 15 advisors, or sometimes even for every 10. Often, a supervisor is assisted by a quality manager who may work with two teams. This structure ensures that each advisor receives adequate attention and support, which is vital for maintaining high levels of service and staff morale.
Tip 3: Create a pleasant working environment
Companies are increasingly recognizing the importance of providing their employees with pleasant working conditions and environments. Beyond ethical reasons, employee well-being directly impacts efficiency, motivation, and ultimately performance.
If you aim to enhance your call center customer service, taking care of your advisors’ well-being is crucial. Gone are the days of overcrowded call centers with agents packed tightly together. In France, for instance, the standard is to allocate 9 m² per consultant, including about 1 m² for the workstation itself, with the NF X35-102 standard even recommending 10 m².
Additionally, it’s vital that companies equip their advisors with the necessary tools: ergonomic chairs in good condition, noise-canceling solutions, quality headphones, and high-performance computers are essential. Considering the predominantly sedentary nature of their work, which involves long periods sitting at a desk, emerging trends include offering mobile solutions like wireless headsets or tablets that allow advisors to move around while staying connected and productive.
Moreover, the effectiveness and well-being of advisors are heavily dependent on the quality of software they use. Utilizing multiple software packages for different tasks can create significant friction, impacting both efficiency and the quality of work. It’s still common to find advisors juggling between four or five different tools.
The shift toward all-in-one software solutions is gaining traction. These solutions consolidate various functionalities to streamline team operations and boost call center customer service. Diabolocom’s customer service software exemplifies this approach, offering features like:
- An omnichannel view that allows advisors and managers to track all customer interactions across different channels — voice, email, social networks, chatbot — in one place.
- Collaboration tools to facilitate the distribution of conversations and tasks among advisors.
- Integrations with CRM software to automate data entry and utilize CRM insights to enhance customer interactions.
- An automatic call distributor to ensure calls are routed to the most appropriate advisors based on specific criteria.
All tools and functionalities provided by Diabolocom are designed to improve not just customer service but also the quality of work for our teams, as we believe these aspects are deeply interconnected.
Tip 4: Implement an industrial approach
After so much emphasis on the human dimension, it may seem paradoxical to speak of an “industrial” approach. Yet, it’s an essential aspect of improving call center customer service.
We use the adjective “industrial” here to refer to the ability to maintain the same level of customer service quality, whatever the volume of calls or processes the contact center has to handle.
An increase in the quantity of work must not have any impact on the quality of the work and the answers given to customers.
This involves setting up a series of structured processes, as well as automating certain workflows, so that advisors can concentrate on their core business: managing customer interactions.
This is where artificial intelligence comes in. Diabolocom software offers a range of AI-based features designed to improve agent productivity by automating certain tasks: voicebot, call transcription and summaries, call categorization, sentiment analysis, detection of next actions to be taken, quality monitoring.
Tip 5: Measure customer and advisor satisfaction
Customer satisfaction with customer services has risen sharply in recent years. 83% of customers reported feeling more loyal to brands that effectively respond to and resolve their complaints according to a Khoros study.
You can only improve what you can measure. How satisfied are your customers? To find out, you need to implement a satisfaction measurement system.
It’s become very easy to send out satisfaction surveys at the end of an interaction. Some companies are even systematically conducting them.
Today’s best practice is to :
- Implement a survey targeting policy that avoids over-soliciting customers.
- Measure their satisfaction not only “hot” (immediately after contact), but also “cold”, a few days later.
Why this double measure? Because after contact, the customer’s problem is not necessarily solved. For example: you promise your customer that you’ll send him a replacement product within 48 hours. When it’s hot, he’ll be satisfied with this solution. Cold, he’ll only be satisfied if the promise has been kept.
The trend is also to ask the advisor to assess customer satisfaction on the spot, and to reconcile this assessment with that of the customer, and, increasingly, to measure advisor satisfaction too. The reason is obvious: an advisor who is not satisfied – with his tools, his working conditions, his hours… – will never make a satisfied customer. Once again, the principle of symmetry of attention applies: employee satisfaction is symmetrical with customer satisfaction, which brings us back to the importance of our first piece of advice.
Improving call center customer service is an ongoing process which, if well managed, has a positive impact on both company performance and customer image. Are you looking for technological solutions to improve your call center customer service and your teams’ productivity? Contact us to discuss your project.
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