You guessed it, it’s that time of year again. Contact center leaders across all industries are preparing their teams for the inevitable spike in customer calls and digital interactions in the coming weeks. If this holiday season is anything like last year’s, customer service teams should brace themselves. In fact, contact center call volume was up 41 percent year-over-year during the five days between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday in 2021. This year could break all records. The question is: Are your contact center agents ready for the holiday season rush?
Changes in technology and consumer expectations will influence how successful call centers operate in 2023 and beyond. You can stay ahead of emerging trends by refining your call center reporting strategy and making adjustments to metrics as needed. Of course, you’ll get the best results when you focus on the call center metrics that matter most to today’s consumers. Consider these call center reporting tactics to stay on top of performance and customer satisfaction benchmarks in the coming year.
Building contact center dashboards can be grueling and for a good reason. These dashboards must highlight correct, relevant, and up-to-date information in order to best inform your teams. But with the sheer volume of interaction data available, one can easily get lost in the details. When building your dashboards, follow these tips to ensure the most critical data is visible and actionable at a glance.
Not all organizations have the capabilities or resources to provide the level of call center support that customers have come to expect. Outsourcing customer service functions to an external third party often allow companies to focus their efforts on other elements of their business, like product or sales development, while also offering consistent and exceptional customer support. When considering outsourcing any customer service elements, BPOs become an important part of the conversation. Discover what a BPO call center is and the various components of implementing them in your customer support models.
Narratives around call center operations are constantly evolving. In an era of cost containment, labor shortages, and customer experience, everyone is looking for a “do it all” magic elixir. Supporting your workforce with the tools and guidance they need to succeed as revenue-generating agents is in the best interest of your business. Enter “in-house” brand champions.
We are midway through 2022. Contact center trends that were forecasted at the beginning of the year have had sticking power and we have seen a common theme emerge as the months have passed. The theme: Strategic organizations are centralizing their operations around consistency.
Customers care about their interactions with your business more than ever before. By unearthing the customer data insights your business call center is already collecting, businesses can better meet customers’ expectations, and improve their overall customer experience. Call center analytics makes it easy to understand your customers.
In a call center, few things are as mission-critical as having adequate information. Being able to understand how each individual, team, product, and channel is performing together at any given point in time helps with agile decision-making and building positive customer experiences. The best way to get the information you need? Call center analytics.
If you work as a contact center manager, you probably have experienced the following scenario: You have several agents out on their scheduled lunches when your website experiences an issue and there is a sudden influx of calls. Your agents that are still logged on are managing the influx to the best of their abilities but you are watching calls getting abandoned and wait times climb. It is stressful for everybody involved and you know this situation could quickly escalate and have serious down-the-line consequences.
Call centers and contact centers are fast-paced environments with a variety of tasks, processes, and team members. However, due to these fast-paced environments, things can also easily fall apart quickly. High call volumes, long queue times, over or understaffing issues, and customer escalations are just a few examples of how a perfectly regular day in a contact center can turn ugly. Call center management is a complex skill to master, but fortunately, with the right tools, strategies, and mindset, the skill becomes more achievable.