One of the most important links to your customers is what happens when they call your company. Are they greeted with a friendly, helpful voice, or an indifferent individual who sounds like they’ve been interrupted?
It takes one bad call experience posted to social media to turn a large number of people away from your company. If that post goes viral, your company could become well-known very quickly for the wrong reasons.
But there are a number of ways to monitor customer interactions in a call center, and correct small problems before they get too big.
Call Center Quality Assurance
Making sure that your customer service representatives are not only talking to customers but actually helping them, requires some resources. However, the benefits of quality assurance go beyond just hiring and firing CSRs.
True, a manager or owner may find that some employees that aren’t a good fit, like many companies do. But working with employees so that they are fully engaged, understand what’s needed, and have the training, abilities, and authority to carry out their job is the first step to having quality first-line interactions with customers.
Various Call Monitoring Techniques
Mistakes happen—there’s no getting around them. Tracking employees’ performance on their calls can help find where CSRs are having issues so that corrective action can be implemented to prevent mistakes before they happen.
Listening in and recording live calls in real time allows a supervisor to observe and take notes on what kind of training or assistance a CSR might need to improve. A company can also be able to understand customers better and make sure the company’s quality standards are being met. While it sounds more like Big Brother than training, engaging with the CSR with call monitoring will help the CSR understand where their shortfalls are and begin improving.
Monitoring and training can include “live whispering,” where a supervisor is on a call with a CSR at the same time, but can speak with the CSR without the customer knowing or hearing the interaction. This allows the manager to coach new CSRs or the ones who need help to meet their metrics and improve their customer interactions.
“Call barging” allows a supervisor to join a CSR on a call when he or she is having trouble, such as with an angry customer. A supervisor can begin speaking directly to a customer, rather than interacting with the CSR either by voice or live text during a call. A supervisor can help diffuse a difficult situation and work out an equitable solution to a customer’s problem.
Key Performance Indicators (KPI)
After observing how CSRs speak with and interact with your customers, a call center will have data that can tell more. Some KPIs that every call center should track include:
- First call resolution tells how much effort it took to resolve a customer’s problem, and how long. The easier it was for them to get an answer or solve a problem, the more likely they will return to buy from you again.
- Average time spent on the phone—the higher, the better. But not too much.
- Call abandonment rate indicates how many customers are on hold too long, and will hang up before a CSR can talk to them.
- The average time of response for a missed call indicates how long CSRs take to get back to a customer. Missed calls are bad for business, keeping track of this rate will indicate the potential for improvement and growth.
- Average Call Length—this can vary depending on what the company sells
- Conversion Rate—how many calls are turning into sales?
Analyzing these KPIs give a good idea of where the call center is doing well, and where it has room to improve.
A 3PL Call Center? Call Us First
3PL Worldwide’s dedicated call center features bilingual employees (English/Spanish) and fast, professional service. Calls are answered within 20 seconds, and our call abandonment rate is less than 2%.
Interested in talking to us? Contact us at (888) 456-1920 or use our online contact form.