Posted by on June, 27 2019 7:29 pm
Every business wants to reduce costs. However, when your business is customer service, balancing the desire to cut costs with the need to provide consistently high quality of service can often feel counterproductive.
Cutting call center costs doesn’t have to mean reducing customer service quality. When you do a little research, it’s entirely possible to do both. Here, we’ll offer you some tips for reducing the costs in your call center without sacrificing the quality of your customer service - and creating the balance you’ve always wished for in your contact center!
When it comes to your call center’s success, a large component is the human element. Your staff is the lifeblood of your facility, so by creating a strong and knowledgeable staff, you are investing in a better future for your center and business.
Where should you start with this process? The beginning, of course. Start with your hiring and new agent training techniques. Improving these techniques will improve the quality of people you bring into your facility - and their qualification for the jobs you hire them for. Better training may incur an upfront investment, but it will reduce the costs of mistakes and inefficiencies over time that may occur.
By improving your hiring and training techniques, you don’t just improve the staff you are bringing into your contact center. You reduce call center costs by minimizing agent turnover. Turnover occurs when agents leave their positions and the facilities they are employed by are forced to hire and train new agents. This can costs these facilities a lot of money - especially when turnover rates are high and hiring and training occur frequently for the same positions.
Offering your agents the best possible training and being more selective in your hiring process will ensure that fewer of these agents vacate their positions over time and less money has to be spent on hiring and training. It’s just one more reason to invest in your hiring and training approaches.
What are your agents doing with their time? If you’re like many call center managers, you may not know the complete answer. That may be costing you a lot of money over time - money that you could be cutting from your budget by improving call center agent monitoring.
This doesn’t mean you have to keep an eye on your agents at all times. Some freedom is not only permissible but encouraged in the workplace. But the more structure you can present in the call center setting, the more motivated your employees are likely to be to remain on task and stay committed to providing excellent customer service. Use technology that allows you to increase your monitoring and collaborative efforts to give your staff the support they need to accomplish their call center agent goals and see the boost in productivity - and the reeducation in call center costs as idle time tumbles!
Perhaps one of the most important aspects of providing top-quality customer service to your consumers in a contact center is first call resolution. This is because your cost per call is one of the primary areas of focus in reducing call center costs.
When it comes to making each of your calls cost less, nothing is quite as effective as making fewer calls overall. The best way to do that is to resolve consumer complaints or concerns during their first call. That will dramatically reduce costs by keeping calls per consumer to a minimum, but also has the added benefit of keeping consumer satisfaction ratings high. After all, no customer wants to have to call your center repeatedly for the same problem. Don’t give them a reason to have to - get the problem solved on the first call!
Directing calls correctly in an incoming call center is of optimal importance when it comes to the reduction of call center costs. Why? Because misdirection can cost your facility major dollars by slowing down your days and making it hard for your agents to get things accomplished. The less your agents are getting done, the more each call they are handling costs your facility.
The best way to handle this is to invest in and deploy a top-quality routing program. Skills-based automatic routing can direct calls to agents based on a variety of factors, including experience with various types of calls, consumers, concerns, and the number of calls currently in a queue for an agent. This way, whoever is most qualified and least preoccupied at the time of an incoming call will be assigned to field it - and your consumers will be satisfied with their experience every time.
Want to reduce call center costs beyond what your on-site agents might be capable of? Hire or assign remote agents to your team. This will allow for numerous advantages, including on-demand scaling, reduced labor hours, better ability to handle peak times, and fewer overhead costs per agent. Plus, much of the technology your agents will need to accomplish their everyday goals will already exist in their homes or personal work site, reducing your costs even further. If not, it’s easily accessible and simple to integrate with your current operating system.
Ready to learn more about reducing call center costs by integrating today’s best contact center technology and methods? Contact the industry experts at ChaseData. We have everything you need to turn your current operation into the most profitable, most efficient version of itself. Whether it’s improving training and hiring or making the workday better for your current team, we can help you do it all - for a lot less than you might think!