How Call Centers Can Simplify Your Customer Service
Today’s businesses are under intense pressure to reduce costs while still providing excellent service to their valued customers. Excellent service means different things to different businesses, but anyone keeping customers satisfied will tell you that first and foremost, you must remain easily accessible.
Call centers are the obvious solution for streamlining call traffic for all customer-based industries. Whether you are approaching customers or gaining and maintaining customer loyalty, a call center will help you meet your organizational goals.
Call centers are common across all industries from professional services (financial, insurance, banking) to medical and service industries.
If your business is looking for a fresh way to improve efficiency, raise employee morale and track costs, ask yourself these basic questions:
- Do multiple employees field repetitive inquiry calls?
- Do we offer customer support via the Web and telephone?
- Do we have identifiable peaks and valleys in call traffic?
- Do certain calls need to be fielded by a select group of representatives?
- Have we placed measures to hold employees accountable for their time?
- Do we have a fair, quantitative means of measuring employee job performance as it is related to call handling?
- Where are our agents/call handlers physically located? Are our choices of employing the best personnel currently limited by our infrastructure?
- Do employees express concerns that workload is not fairly distributed?
- Are outbound calls made by a group of employees for the purpose of soliciting business, setting appointments or conducting research?
Unlike most efforts to increase customer satisfaction, a call center may also assist your organization in reducing operational costs and increasing profits. With a well thought out call center, you can not only route calls as efficiently as possible, but you can track all aspects of inbound and outbound call traffic. This valuable call information will assist you in both personnel hiring and scheduling for optimal customer support at the lowest cost to you.
ATCOM markets the most comprehensive, application-specific, progressive call center technology available.
Some of these Call Center technologies include:
- Real time supervisor monitoring of queue status with the ability to log agents in and out of a queue as call volume demands
- Detailed reporting showing statistics on average hold times, abandoned calls, average time to answer
- Management reporting showing logged in and logged out times, and calls handled, for performance management
- Shift scheduling for agents
- Agent forecasting based on past call history
- Cradle to grave tracking of calls to improve the flow of calls through an organization
- Agent desktop display to keep agents in the know on queue performance
- Multimedia Call Center routing with the ability to queue emails, faxes, and agent web chat sessions, just as you would a call
- Intelligent call management to provide expected hold times to VIP callers in queue
- Skills based routing to direct calls to the most qualified agent