As your customer contact center business grows, so does your client base. And in most cases, it also means a spike in support requests, concerns, and inquiries. This is why you should know how to properly scale your contact center operations to meet its growing demand.
Unfortunately, scaling any business, including customer contact centers, take a lot of work. You need the right people, tools, and a robust strategy to successfully put things off. But regardless of your customer contact center’s size, the scaling process doesn’t need to be complicated.
The key is knowing your goals to scale your business effectively. For example, do you need to use voicemail drops and invest in other tools to serve clients better? Or do you wish to level up your contact center’s competitiveness?
How To Carry Out Customer Contact Center Scaling Operations Successfully
If you know where to start, it’ll be much easier to start scaling your company. In this guide, you’ll learn how to successfully scale your customer contact center. Continue reading to learn more.
1. Assess Your Current Operations
Before scaling your customer contact center, you must understand its current state of business operations.
Regardless of the tools you use, whether you rely on Auto Dialer or other similar platforms, you must assess your current operations to identify areas that need improvement. To do this, keep the following in mind:
- Review Customer Feedback
One of the most valuable sources of information to assess your contact center is to review each customer’s feedback. Analyze it to determine common problems, including poor communication, long queues, and other unresolved concerns.
If you’re knowledgeable of client concerns, you can quickly identify the areas that require improvement and help you develop the right strategies to resolve problem areas.
- Analyze Metrics
You can assess your current operations using call center technology tools to analyze different metrics, such as first call resolution, average handle time, and client satisfaction ratings. For instance, if your company’s average call handling time is higher than usual, you might need to provide more training programs to your agents or streamline your process to improve it.
- Perform Process Mapping
If you want to visualize your customer contact center’s operations, the best thing you should do is conduct process mapping. It’ll help you identify redundancies, inefficiencies, and bottlenecks. Do a process mapping exercise to know the areas where you can boost efficiency, eliminate possible redundancies, and streamline your operations.
- Seek Employee Feedback
Aside from customer feedback, you need to get feedback from your employees. Since they’re working in your customer contact center, they’re well aware of your daily operations. With that in mind, they can give valuable insights on how you can upgrade your processes to scale your company.
When getting employee feedback, ask them about the areas that need improvement to boost effectiveness and efficiency. Ask for suggestions to improve daily processes and get rid of redundancies.
Assessing your current processes and operations is vital to scaling your customer contact center. Nonetheless, it must be a continuous process to help you determine if your business is evolving and growing.
2. Invest In Technology
In today’s highly competitive market with countless options to choose from, you need to invest in technology to set your contact center apart and scale it effectively. Having advanced technology in place won’t only ensure your operations will run smoothly, but it can help your contact center achieve long-term access too.
At present, there are several contact center technological trends you can consider. If you’re wondering which ones are best for your business, you may try the following options:
- Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
IVR is an automated phone system enabling incoming callers to access information without communicating. Callers may help themselves enter information by speaking into the phone or a touch-tone keypad.
Several IVR systems offer various levels of natural language speech recognition. Reliable speech recognition tools have data and grammar to recognize an expansive vocabulary and different dialects.
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Unlike other contact center tools, CRM tools provide agents immediate access to customer information to resolve client needs or concerns as fast as possible. Plus, contact center agents may use a CRM to document customer interactions, which can be accessed should the caller require more assistance in the future.
Having accessible data from CRMs can help agents resolve customer problems more efficiently. Moreover, these tools can provide insights into all customer interactions, allowing you to manage calls or issues more effectively.
- Predictive Dialer
Predictive dialers automatically dial from a list of contacts. These save your team’s time as they detect busy signals, disconnected numbers when there’s no answer, and voicemail messages.
The good thing about predictive dialing is that it can be applied to various channels, including email, chat, mobile, text, and the like. It detects the client’s channel of choice and provides the interaction directly when the sales rep answers the call.
In addition, you can use predictive dialers to deliver proactive outreach in case of emergencies or to educate customers on where their cases are in the queue.
- Quality Management (QM) Systems
QM systems provide managers insights into employee performance to identify areas of weakness. Additionally, call center managers may use QM to ensure agents adhere to internal procedures and policies.
For example, if agents aren’t taking their break at the right time, it might affect their productivity. Knowing how agents adhere to training, scheduling, and workload balance helps you build a more efficient customer contact center.
- Call Recording Systems
Call recording systems are useful for capturing customer interactions. They’re helpful should agents need to review what happened on calls. More advanced recording tools not only record calls yet can capture other interactions related to the calls too, such as chat sessions and emails.
Call recording can be in real-time, enabling contact center supervisors to intercept the norm call, intercept off-scripts, and provide coaching. For best results, use analytics reporting tools with call recording systems to get valuable insights that may be handy to scale your customer contact center.
Your primary goal when running a customer contact center is offering superb customer service. Choose the right technologies to scale your contact center efficiently, whether you’re focused on email, inbound calls, chats, text messages, or outbound calls.
3. Hire The Right People
Hiring the right people is crucial for any business, but it’s especially important for contact centers. Your agents serve as the front lines of your company, and they play a critical role in delivering excellent customer experiences.
If you’re having a tough time finding excellent talents for your customer contact center, tweak your hiring tactics and consider the following tips:
- Handpick The Best Candidates And Call Them
There are instances when the people you want in your contact center may not know your existence, so you should take the initiative to search for them. Typically, a great place to start is on professional network platforms like LinkedIn.
Once you’ve found several promising candidates, contact them immediately. Connecting with your prospective ideal candidates personally shows that you want them. But you must make your pitch convincing to get their attention and encourage them to accept your offer.
- Choose People With Natural, Effective Communication Skills
When it comes to becoming an agent, communication is crucial. They should know how to speak to the clients. Not only does it take good communication skills, but agents should understand and be patient to manage calls to exceed and meet customer expectations.
- Have An Open Mind
Even if you want to hire agents who fit your criteria, you won’t always find candidates that meet all your requirements. Some agents won’t fit neatly into your expectations, and it’s okay. These are wild cards, and each contact center requires dynamic workers who are out of the norm.
Pay attention to these gems. Besides, diversity can be a huge advantage in terms of finding the best agents and having employees that may think outside of the box to help boost your contact center’s efficiency.
Your customer contact center will only be successful with the right team members. By hiring the best candidates, creating a contact center that delivers exceptional customer service and supports your business’s growth and success is possible.
4. Train Your Contact Center Agents
No matter how well your agents perform in their jobs, it doesn’t mean they won’t need the proper tools and training to handle calls effectively. You need to train your agents to scale your customer contact center and achieve great results. Doing so will help them deliver a helpful and positive customer experience.
When training your agents to improve your workforce management, here are some tips to consider:
- Teach Your Agents Proper Call Center Etiquette
Once you work in the same industry for a long time, particular aspects of the job may become second nature. Yet you have to remember that not all agents are the same. Others may not be aware of proper phone etiquette and other second-nature skills.
The good news is that such skills can be taught to each trainee at contact centers. It’s where training programs come in.
Don’t take for granted the significance of training agents to treat customers in a friendly and respectful manner. As call center agents, small nuances may affect one’s customer support experience.
Case in point, if your agents put customers on hold, be sure they know the importance of communicating wait times. Customers who don’t know when the agent will return will hang up or feel frustrated while waiting.
When you train agents about proper contact center etiquette, you provide them tools they need to make customers feel respected, safe, and valued. And this is the foundation of good customer service.
- Set Clear Objectives
Without goals, your agents may feel stuck in their work with no particular place to go. Therefore, make sure to set clear objectives with enough training options. This way, your agent will feel motivated to grow in their role. Such objectives must be paired with regular coaching, which may boost agent performance and improve employee engagement.
Whatever objectives you want to set, ensure they’re measurable and attainable. For instance, a goal of zero missed calls each week isn’t realistic for brand-new contact center agents. Unattainable objectives will only set your new hires up for failure, resulting in reduced productivity.
- Provide Feedback
Most agents will never know if they’re on the right track unless you give them feedback. To provide constructive feedback, you should understand your agents’ struggles and how they can improve them.
An excellent way to do that is by observing calls. Review their call recordings to evaluate your agents’ etiquette and identify their weaknesses and strengths. Other call center managers create scorecards to assess agents’ calls.
Once you tell agents about the areas that require improvement, help them achieve it by sharing educational and helpful articles or resources to sharpen their skills. Such resources may turn feedback into actionable advice, enabling agents to hone their knowledge.
Use these training tips to help your agents learn more about providing friendly and professional phone conversations with your customers. When implemented correctly, training may help improve your agents’ skills, enabling them to perform satisfactorily.
5. Measure And Analyze Results
You can add several modifications or upgrades to scale your customer contact center. Nevertheless, it’s useless if you won’t measure or analyze the results.
You need to track your progress if you don’t want to waste your time and money on various solutions. When a strategy isn’t working, make changes and experiment with other strategies. For example, if group training doesn’t deliver results, try a one-on-one approach instead.
Use data from your analytics tools to track your progress and identify areas to improve. Then use that information to make well-informed decisions and tweaks to optimize your operations.
6. Don’t Stop Improving
Scaling doesn’t stop after upgrading your tools and hiring the right people for your contact center. You need to remember that it’s an ongoing process for continuous improvement.
With that in mind, always update your processes and review your operations. Doing so will help ensure your strategies, modifications, and technologies are efficient and effective.
Regular feedback from your agents and customers can make a difference as well in successfully scaling your contact center. This way, you can quickly implement changes and improve other areas to ensure your organization is performing at its peak.
Conclusion:- Scaling your customer contact center may not be easy. But once you’ve done it successfully, it can help you keep up with the market demands, boost your profit margins, and improve efficiency. If you’re ready to grow your contact center, use the guide above to unlock and maximize its full potential.