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Unhappy customers, disengaged employees, agents quitting, an ever-increasing volume of calls to handle — add managing remote workers to that list of challenges, and it’s clear why contact centre management isn’t easy.
Contact centres and call centres are notoriously stressful environments, and workforce management in a contact centre can be an onerous task. Don’t be discouraged, though. There are solutions to help you overcome some of the top challenges that can undermine the success of your call centre operations.
Here are five of the most significant challenges in contact centre management today as well as common sense suggestions for how managers can handle them effectively.
The primary goal of any contact centre manager, whether it’s focused on customer service, support or sales, should be customer satisfaction. According to a recent global report by Salesforce, 88% of consumers say the customer experience (CX) delivered by a company is as important as the product or service it provides. This makes maintaining the customer experience a tall order for any manager.
There’s a lot of research and thought leadership out there offering insights and advice on how brands can enhance CX. But a key takeaway that emerges from all of them is this: Take good care of the customer and the customer will take care of you. That is, a customer who feels like a VIP is likely to reward you with their business, brand loyalty, a high customer satisfaction score, and more.
Consumers using digital channels to reach a contact centre or calling into a call centre want their issues resolved or their questions answered as quickly and efficiently as possible. When they connect with your business for service or support, they have an expectation that the agent they encounter is eager and ready to do their job well. Consumers also value a personalised experience where the agent does their best to anticipate their needs and concerns.
You can set up your call centre team to deliver great customer experiences by developing and encouraging a workplace culture among your agents that emphasises and rewards customer care all along the customer journey.
Here’s where new technologies can assist in smoothing the overall customer journey. Interactive Voice Response (IVR) is just one tool that delivers a personalised customer experience by gathering information about the customer’s reason for calling and routing the call appropriately. Customers don’t appreciate long wait times, or getting the runaround, so making sure they connect with the right agent on the first try can score big points in customer satisfaction.
Employee turnover in contact centres is not only significant, it’s higher than the national average. That makes contact centre workforce management even more challenging.
Contact centre agents leave their jobs at 1.3 times the rate of employees in other professions. Agent attrition in customer service roles is an eye-opening 87.6%. Sales also sees a significant rate of attrition (79.8%).
For many call centre managers, high agent attrition rates are a fact of life, and they must be prepared to continually find ways to recruit new agents.
The way to combat attrition is to play a more hands-on role with agents. That doesn’t mean micromanaging them, but establishing a positive workplace culture. It also includes playing to agents’ strengths and recognising and helping to address areas for improvement.
For example, while it may be tempting to throw new hires into the deep end in hopes of quickly filling gaps in your team, it can backfire. Agents who suddenly feel they are “in over their head” can easily succumb to stress and become early candidates for burnout, leaving you scrambling for replacements.
A better approach is to ease newly hired agents into their roles to the extent possible in your busy call centre operation. Assign them tasks with realistic goals and avoid overloading them.
Coaching call centre teams helps to improve agent retention. Coaching isn’t something that should occur only when an agent is learning the ropes. With ongoing training and coaching, you can fully develop your team and help your rock stars rise even higher. A good training program also features a transparent recognition and reward program to encourage excellence. (For more on this, see the “Keeping Up with Technology” section below.)
Lastly, an engaged employee is an employee who is more likely to stay with your organisation for the long term. Monitor your agents for signs of stress and burnout, provide meaningful support, promote health and wellness, and make sure your team is motivated by incentivising them to succeed. Schedule team-building exercises, arrange friendly in-house competitions, share insights and kudos, and focus on developing a positive workplace culture.
Technology can be the truest arrow in a call manager’s quiver when it comes to keeping workforce management in the contact centre on track. However, it can also bog down the entire operation if it isn’t useful or up to date. Effective call centre managers keep abreast of the latest technology solutions to minimise IT issues and increase team efficiency.
Are you embracing cloud-based software and artificial intelligence (AI) to streamline your operations and free up valuable time in your contact centre management program? If not, you should consider making that move sooner than later. In an era of omnichannel communication, contact centres can use technology to seamlessly handle communications from customers coming from various channels, including social media, text, email and, of course.
AI-powered solutions like Invoca can greatly improve contact centre management by providing the ability to analyse huge amounts of data from calls in real time. Invoca lets managers track every call into the contact centre and receive an AI-analysed transcription immediately following each call. This has tremendous benefits for call centre team performance because managers are empowered to quickly identify coaching moments and provide timely insight and feedback to employees.
Agent coaching is one of the most time-consuming aspects of a manager’s job. But by automating call recording and transcription and using AI to score every customer service call, managers can increase the impact of their coaching and training programs, and reduce the lift to do so. With the right technology, managers can provide agents with unbiased feedback to help them grow and succeed in their call centre careers.
More companies are adapting their workforce management strategies for a post-pandemic world and actively embracing remote work for the long term. Remote and hybrid work arrangements allow many companies to save money by ditching the real estate needed to house call centres. More importantly, it allows them to recruit more broadly, a factor that is amplified by a parallel trend in contact centre workforce management known as homeshoring, which is bringing more call centre jobs back to the U.S.
Many call centre workers prefer to work from home — if only to avoid a daily commuting grind. It’s been estimated that prior to the pandemic, 90% of customer service agents in the United States commuted to work. That number is expected to be about 50% moving forward, as many companies, including major brands like Amazon, continue to encourage remote work among agents.
Remote work poses unique challenges for managers since it is tougher, at least in theory, to manage and coach agents and distributed teams effectively without face-to-face interaction.
Coaching call centre teams who are working remotely doesn’t have to be difficult if you’re willing to adopt technology that can help support your efforts to provide virtual coaching.
The emergence of cloud-based solutions for the call centre such as Invoca makes communication and coaching easier for managers and accessible to agents wherever they are located, even internationally.
With Invoca, managers can easily review call recordings and transcripts and tag agents in comments. You can easily give every agent immediate feedback to help them improve their performance.
Invoca’s AI scores 100% of calls, giving you a complete picture of each agent’s performance. This makes efficient and frequent micro coaching an easy lift, even when your call centre team is distributed across multiple locations. Invoca also helps you keep a pulse on what’s happening in the conversations your agents have with customers, so can track trends and overall team performance.
Contact centres collect data from hundreds and thousands of customer interactions each day. This can create a time-consuming challenge for managers charged with call centre tracking and analytics.
It’s also tough for managers to ensure the accuracy of information when dealing with huge data dumps. Inaccurate data can skew analytics and negatively impact future planning and operations.
Deploying the right technology helps call centre managers better understand data, which means spending less time detecting issues and more time providing solutions.
One area where data is vital to smooth operations is quality assurance (QA). Scoring your agents’ calls to make sure they are following the script and focusing on first call resolution is key to fostering a high-performing team and successful call centre operation.
However, your agents handle a lot of calls, and that means a lot of data to plow through. Managers may track just a small sample of calls and use that small snapshot view as a base for evaluating and scoring agent performance. But what if your agent is just having a bad day? Is that score fair?
Artificial intelligence now makes it possible for managers to get a complete picture of agent performance by capturing data from every call into the call centre. Invoca does this by automating recording and transcribing, then using conversation intelligence to analyse and score 100% of calls into the contact centre. This automated call quality assurance provides full insight into, and levels the playing field for, agent performance by delivering an unbiased score.
Managers can begin taking advantage of Invoca’s robust call centre solution to help overcome common contact centre management challenges from the moment a new agent is hired.
By tracking, recording, transcribing, and analysing every customer call into the contact centre, Invoca provides a knowledge base designed to arm agents with the necessary tools to handle even the most complex customer inquiry. Managers can call out examples in actual recordings and transcripts to immediately show agents where they are exceeding expectations and where they are falling short, and provide immediate coaching on how to recover.
Call centre managers can also use Invoca to uplevel agent performance through automated QA scoring. As noted earlier, Invoca’s conversation intelligence removes the bias from QA scoring, providing agents with a level playing field and relieving managers from the pressure of manual scoring. And, since Invoca’s QA scoring is based on agent performance on every call, not just a small sample, it provides managers with a complete picture of how everyone on the team is developing.
Using Invoca to support contact centre management is a win-win for managers because the technology can benefit employees and customers in very positive ways. Happier agents are better-performing agents who are more likely to stay with the organisation. And customers dealing with happier, more helpful agents are more likely to stay loyal to your brand.
Want to learn more about how Invoca can help you overcome your call centre management challenges? Check out these resources:
