What happens in your contact center when calls are coming in faster than you have the staff to handle? Ideally, this doesn’t ever happen in your call center. But if your facility is like most, you’ve been caught unprepared for peak times and seasons at least a few times before.

To better manage your peak times and keep your customers satisfied and well-served, it’s important to understand when and why these events happen and how to address them. It’s also important to have the tools to do so. Here, we’ll look at both factors in this equation - and how to set your facility up for success.

Techniques - How to Better Handle Peak Times

A sudden influx of incoming calls can be overwhelming for an under-prepared contact center staff. Preparing beforehand can mean the difference in success and failure during these busy days.

Your agents’ focus every day should be on customer service. Empathy statements are always important, but they are especially critical during peak times, since they can give consumers who are dealing with longer waits or busier agents the sense that their concerns are being heard and addressed properly. When these statements are made, be sure that your agents are following up on them and providing top-notch customer service at every stage of the call. Preparing your staff to handle calls effectively will help them do so quickly and get them moving on to the next call, reducing wait times and the backlog of calls that build up during peak times.

Regardless of how many consumer requests are coming in, it’s important to maintain your facility’s standards of service at all times. If your standards begin to slip during peak seasons, you will find those peak times begin to occur less and less as consumers take their business elsewhere. To keep traffic up along with business, keep your focus during every call - no matter the daily number - on customer satisfaction and positive customer experience.

Above all else, it pays to remain motivated. When things begin to feel overwhelming for you and your staff, it’s a good idea to keep your focus on what is working and what you do best. Good workplace morale goes much further than any other investment can; keeping your employees motivated, happy, and encouraged can keep them in their positions longer and keep them working with increased efficiency and productivity. No matter how heavy your facility’s workload is, be sure to focus on praising and congratulating your staff when possible and motivating them along the way.

Technology - Using a Telemarketing Predictive Dialer to Keep Pace in Peak Times

Now that you’ve seen how teachable techniques can make a major difference in your agents’ approach to customer service during peak times, let’s look at how technology can do the same.

Perhaps one of the best tools for doing this is the telemarketing predictive dialer. When you’re in a mixed call center or one where you’re making strictly outbound calls, peak times can be more difficult to manage, since you’re responsible for making each call in a certain period of time, rather than simply fielding calls. No matter how many agents you have on staff, meeting those metrics can be difficult without the technology to support your efforts.

A telemarketing predictive dialer helps to make more calls, close more sales, and create more business, no matter how long your contact list may be.

Some of the advantages of employing this technology include:

• Less time wasted between calls since the dialer makes the calls for your agents instead of having them manually dial each number and wait for a connection.
• More connections per agent, per workday. This shortens your to-contact list and makes peak times more manageable.
• More time for agents to focus on more important tasks.

In addition to these basic but brilliant features, many of today’s best telemarketing predictive dialer programs include additional features that help you make the most of your agent’s time and make even the busiest days more manageable. These may include:

• Management of contacts. Contact information changes frequently. Updating it in the system is an important part of keeping your database current and functional. Doing so automatically and from one central location in the system is a feature that the best dialer programs
  
  
• Recording and notation of calls. When you’re finished with a call, you should be able to listen to and read over the transcription of that call to see what went well and what could have gone better. This feature comes standard in many of today’s best dialer programs.
  
  
• Integrated reporting tools. Want to see reports related to the progress of your agents and their performance on calls, even during the busiest days? Integrated reporting that comes standard as part of many dialer programs lets you do this with just a few quick clicks.

Obviously, a telemarketing predictive dialer is primarily aimed at outbound call centers. However, there are plenty of technological solutions for both mixed and inbound call centers that can make even the busiest of days faster, simpler, and easier on your agents than ever before. Knowing where to find this technology - and applying it to the techniques you’re already training your agents to use - is the first step in preparing your facility to handle even the toughest of peak times without a problem.

For more information about today’s best telemarketing predictive dialers and all of the tools and technology you need to keep pace with consumer demands, contact the experts at ChaseData. We have everything you need to make peak times just another day at the office for your staff. Give us a call today to learn more and put our solutions to work managing even your busiest seasons, so you can make them your most profitable, too!