Call centres are an integral part of a customer-focused business. They represent a major asset for improving interaction with customers, resolving their problems and increasing brand awareness.
The customer service industry has grown by leaps and bounds, and most call centres now use cutting-edge technology to improve their performance. To stay ahead of the game, a call centre must always focus on improving the quality of customer service.
In this article, we demonstrate that mastering the art of analysing reports and key indicators is an essential part of successfully optimising customer service. The most important thing to remember here is that numbers are our best friends.
Customer service optimisation: reporting and analysis within a call centre
Reports and analyses will have a positive impact on call centre performance if they are read and executed correctly. Although generally considered to be identical, these two elements are in fact two different things.
Reporting allows you to read the strategy and helps you to understand the key KPIs, but for this you need to opt for the best reporting tools.
Analysis, on the other hand, makes sense of the information in the report to enable call centre management to do long-term business planning or to address different customer service scenarios.
It is possible to identify performance problems in the call centre based on the results displayed in the dashboard. There are a number of questions you need to ask yourself to start mapping the situation:
- Is the team understaffed or are the call centre agents underperforming?
- What is the call arrival pattern? How are call volumes distributed?
- Are the different time slots staffed with the right number of people?
- Is there a particular behavioural pattern to investigate?
- Are these one-off callers or a backlog?
- What are the results linked to the quality of team performance within the call centre?
- Is there a streamlined process and flow from the start to the end of the call?
- Can the customer service agents do their job to the best of their ability?
- What is the call centre’s competitive strategy?
- What do customer opinions say about the quality of customer service?
Optimising customer service: KPIs to monitor in a call centre
In terms of reports, there are certain data that provide more information about the situation. For example, reports on agent activity and status help to design coaching strategies that could improve and calibrate the overall performance and productivity of the customer service team.
KPIs such as average handling time, post-call working time and average waiting time can give an initial insight into the processes and resources available within the call centre.
These indicators can be used to answer a number of questions, such as: is there a need to provide a better knowledge base or more intuitive training materials? Does the team lack interactive or automated steps to use during and after the call? Would simpler workflows help to improve metrics?
There are several technological and cultural solutions available today to optimise the performance of call centre agents. A digital cloud solution, powered by AI technology, can help call centre agents respond to customer requests and reduce waiting times to improve customer satisfaction.
On the other hand, by comparing the best and worst performing agents in terms of call time, it is possible to see that there is a silo culture that has an impact on the quality of customer service. Indeed, the lack of commitment and communication has a major influence on any structure. However, it is always possible to envisage cultural transformation strategies to overcome these problems.
Optimising customer service: customer experience strategies within a call centre
By analysing call centre figures and correlating data to understand trends and behaviours, it is possible to answer operational questions and provide more detailed information aimed at proposing a successful CX strategy.
There are several studies that compare a traditional channel, which requires more effort from the customer, with faster digital options, such as chat. Some of these studies show that in terms of customer service, the majority of customers still prefer to use voice rather than other digital channels. Who said it wasn’t possible to mix tradition and efficiency in the same context?
Sometimes, to achieve a high-performance call centre, it’s not enough to adjust the parameters without looking at anything else. You have to bear in mind that the ultimate objective for a call centre is above all to achieve maximum results or productivity with minimum wasted effort or expenditure of energy. This is the very definition of efficiency.
Ensuring that processes, quality, IVR, knowledge base and so on are up to date will have a more profound impact on improving performance than recruiting new people or putting even more pressure on the existing team.
The best strategy for effective customer service is to improve the way call centre agents do their jobs by making them more efficient. This means working with more people and using the right communication and collaboration tools.
Customers always appreciate a more human interaction, which usually takes the form of an agent’s voice and empathy.
Advancia Teleservices is one of the leading call centres in Tunisia, because it places innovation and excellence in customer service at the heart of its concerns. Do not hesitate to contact us for an offer that will allow you to benefit from the performance of our agents who are experts in customer satisfaction ?