Designing A Better Call Centre
Designing A better Call Centre
Call centres, we’ve all had to deal with them. We all know just how terrible they can be. What if we could make them better?
Call centres have been around since the dawn of telephones and they’re not going anywhere. While people have tried LiveChats and using email to solve an issue, call centres are still king. In the words of Winston Churchill
Call centres “are the worst form of” tech support “except for all the other ones”
Not quite the original quote but you get the idea. When people are frustrated they want to talk to a human, not a computer. This is why when a representative from a call centre is not helpful it can drive away customers.
Think about it, if you ring up a company and they can’t fix your issue are you going to stay.
Where can we improve
There’s two sides to a call centre, the technical and the people. The two must work together to provide the best experience for a user. Technology is easily worked out. It’s what we do best here at alphaTALK. A simple dial plan to send customers in the right direction, but we’ll talk more about that later.
People, that’s why you ring a call centre. So train these people. That goes without saying but how do you train them.
The Radclyffe Group’s president, Elizabeth Ahearn, reports that call centers typically spend 80 percent of new hire training time on product training, 10 percent on call center systems training, and the remainder on hard and soft skills.
Now while familiarity with the product is important been able to interact with a customer is more important. As I have an issue I would like to be guided through it by someone who can communicate with me what they are doing.
Elizibeth recommends people should devote 50 percent of time to hard and soft skills training. She calls this interaction training. Then 35 percent to product, and 15 percent on systems.
This means that while not as familiar with the product they will be faster at sussing out the problem and helping the customer.
Every customer satisfaction survey she’s done cites speed of issue resolution at the top of the list.
Guiding the customer down the right path
Be you a call centre with a single employee or one with hundreds specialization is key. Create a dial tree where you send the customer to the correct person to deal with it. The important part with this to strike the right balance between the amount of options and not enough. You need to have enough so that the receiver has an understanding of what the issue is going to be related to but not so many that they end up frustrated.
When training a new employee, focus on one area they can help customers first so that they can begin to work as soon as possible. Have sectors of the call centre for different issues. However, move people around these sectors as they can trained up. Working in a call centre is not the most interesting job in the world so make sure employees have a bit of variety.
As I just said, the best way to learn something is to actually do it. Give the employee basic training, then start them on the job. After a bit evaluate how they’re doing and train them more. This means you get more productivity out of your worker and more quality in the long run.
Think of it similarly to how you train an apprentice with on the job training as well as some off on the job training.
What’s the most important part of the process
This is a simple answer…
SPEED
No one wants to be on the phone to a call centre for a long amount of time, you need to get their problem fixed ASAP.
Yes, fix their issue to the best of your ability. Yes, be lovely and helpful while you do it. But, speed is the thing they care about most. They will thank you for the less amount of time they have to speak to you. Also, the faster you are the more customers you can deal with.
Wins for everyone.
Do you need a phone system for your call centre, try the alphatalk all in one Hosted PBX system that can change the way you take phone calls.
Ring us today on 0207 177 5000 in order to find out more.
