15 Best Practices for Call Center Management

A report from Salesforce suggests that 91% of the customers will engage again with a company that offers excellent customer services. Additionally, 83% of the customers wish to speak directly with someone as soon as they contact a company.

These statistics indicate the importance of having a good system in place for call center management. However, the multiplicity of operations around a call center and constant calls from customers asking questions and queries can make things overwhelming.

But you can smoothen out everything if you know the best practices for call center management. Well, let us help you out with the same.

This article outlines some of the best call center management practices, and by the end of it, you’ll have the perfect strategy to keep up with great operations in your call center.

What is Call Center Management?

Running a successful business encompasses many operations and constant calling for hiring, training, internal communications, and most importantly, customer support is an important activity for every business. How the business manages these calling activities falls into the purview of call center management.

However, statistics reveal that half of the customers feel that the companies need to change how they’re offering customer support.

Moreover, a report from Bain & Company suggests that improving your customer service experience can help increase revenue by between 4-8%.

Given these factors, it becomes important for your company to follow call center management best practices. If you’re wondering what they are, have a read further.

15 Best Practices for Call Center Management

Multiple statistics and data that we have discussed so far have suggested the need and importance of having the right strategy for managing your business’ call center operations. So, here’s a look at 15 of the best practices that you can follow for effective call center management.

1. Hire the Best Employees

The employee turnover rate in call centers is always high. A statistic from Tech See reveals that the average employee turnover rate in call centers over the past few years has been between 35-40%.

This can majorly be because of the extra pressure and load coming up with a job at call centers. Working in a call center requires an extraordinary level of patience and tolerance as you need to deal with people of different personalities and temperaments. So, keeping your calm becomes essential. This is possible only when you have competent individuals handling the job.

Incompetent individuals might get rude to the customers or not understand and solve the issues at hand.

However, hiring managers and recruiters hardly pay any attention to the qualities and traits of the candidates during the recruitment process. This inattentiveness can create loopholes in the call center management process.

You need to have the best employees on the seats to handle the calls if you want your call center operations to go on smoothly and efficiently. So, it becomes essential to put up a great recruitment process in place so that you may hire only the best employees for the job.

This article can help you understand the best recruitment practices so that you get the right people on the job at your call center.

You can also refer to the infographic below to find some amazing tips for hiring the best employees.

Source

2. Leverage Call Monitoring & Scoring

When you’re looking forward to managing your call center operations, it becomes essential to keep track of the individual performance of your agents. The best way to know how your agents are managing their calls is to monitor and listen to their interactions with the customers.

Leveraging call monitoring and scoring the calls will come off as advantageous in finding the areas of improvement. You can provide practical training to the employees based on the scoring and monitoring of their calls, thereby enhancing call quality and supporting better call management.

3. Incorporate Customer Feedback into Performance Improvements

Continuous skill development and performance improvement are a part of the process. When you’re working on the same for a call center process, customer feedback becomes your biggest aid in supporting such skill enhancement and improvement.

Customers will share their service experience with your brand and how they feel about the call management and customer support process. So, if you use the feedback provided by the customers in planning your training and performance improvement programs, it will go a long way in helping improve and enhance the entire call center management process and boost the quality of customer service.

4. Emphasize Employee Engagement

A job at a call center is overwhelming, and that’s why the industry seems to have such a high turnover rate, as much as up to 40%, as mentioned by a study on Tech See.

Such a huge rate of turnover creates a significant effect on call center management and operations, making things mismanaged and chaotic at times. Emphasizing employee engagement activities can help deal with such situations and reduce employee turnover, thereby smoothening the call center operations.

Moreover, employee engagement activities will help create a positive atmosphere in the workplace and keep everyone energetic and enthusiastic, leading to performance improvement and enhanced productivity. Start engaging your employees and turn to data insights with the right employee engagement software.

You can have activities as small as a simple one-on-one interaction with the employees to as huge as a trip with all the employees where they can let loose and come back to work with more energy after a good break.

Some more instances of employee engagement activities to improve call center management are brainstorming sessions, team meetings and activities, happy hours, employee referral programs, and more.

Moreover, statistics reveal that such activities make employees more excited to come to work, and the point will be clear upon the analysis of the graph shown below.

Source

5. Communicate Regularly with Your Employees

An infographic from Ultimate Software explains multiple parameters that make the employees work more productively with the company. It reveals that three-fourths of the employees in an organization seek respect and recognition and would work more engagingly and enthusiastically when the organization listens to their ideas and thoughts.

Source

So, it becomes essential that you communicate with your employees on a regular basis to manage your call center operations well.

Regular conversations with your employees will also help communicate the shortcomings with the work and call management and it can further help with performance improvement.

6. Consider Essential KPIs While Making Decisions

The call duration, call transfers, response time, hold time, etc., will matter a lot in the management of your call center operations. These are the key performance indicators that show how well your organization is doing.

Such KPIs become essential for the decision-making process. For instance, if the call duration is invariably and unreasonably long, you may need to train your employees for better and faster call management so that the queries are solved more quickly, and the employees are able to take more calls within the same duration.

Source

7. Avoid Negative Language

Customers are always inclined towards positive and polite agents and will be highly put off by something that comes out in a negative tone. When managing calls during customer service, it will always help if you refrain from the use of negative words like “don’t,” “cannot,” “unable,” etc.

For instance, when talking to a customer, if there’s something you’re not sure about or don’t know the answer at all, instead of using a phrase like “I am not sure about this,” you can say, “Let me take a quick scan and assure you about the same.”

Using positive customer service phrases like these gives the customers the confidence that they’ll receive the help they need and will also make them want to come back for your services.

Source

8. Empower Your Agents

Employees look for recognition and respect at work, and you can offer the same by empowering your agents at work. It would mean providing them the authority to make decisions and use their creative abilities to handle and manage their calls.

When you empower your agents for call center management, they’re able to take the calls with more confidence and solve customer queries with more efficiency due to the confidence beaming from the authority available at hand.

Such activities will also involve offering the right accessories and tools for call management to employees and trusting them with their work while also constantly monitoring the same without showing any trace of micromanagement.

9. Reward Your Team With the Right Incentives

Incentives offer an instant boost for better performance and higher productivity. It shows the employees that you are acknowledging and appreciating their efforts.

There can be multiple ways to offer the right incentives to your agents. For instance, you can devise and incorporate an incentive plan within the organization or even offer impromptu incentives at times for exceptional and extraordinary performances.

10. Provide Frequent Call Center Training

Providing frequent and regular training to the employees will help improve their performance with call management and offer great experiences, which is essential to the customers.

A report from Zendesk mentions that 60% of customers are inclined to be loyal to a brand when they receive good customer service.

So, training your employees for call management at frequent intervals will improve the quality of their calls and ensure that everything remains well-managed.

Some ways to offer training to your agents can be conducting coaching sessions, brainstorming, virtual meetings, etc.

11. Resolve Issues Quickly & Reliably

As per industry standards, the first call resolution rate matters a lot, and companies use different parameters to determine the call resolution rate.

Source

However, whatever the parameters, as per industry standards, the first call resolution rate must be 70-75%. Moreover, call duration is an important KPI for efficient call management. The lower your call durations, the better your call management rates.

So, it’s essential that you resolve the issues very swiftly and reliably to keep up with call center management best practices.

12. Measure Different Call Center Campaigns

Performance measurement is a key indicator of how well your customers look up to your brand. So, when you run different call center campaigns, it becomes essential to measure them and mark the performance based on important call center metrics and KPIs.

Some of the most important KPIs that you must measure in your campaigns are customer retention rate, first call resolution rate, first response time, customer satisfaction, etc.

Measuring these metrics within the campaigns will help understand the loopholes in performance, and you can work on improving them for better call center management.

13. Invest in Technology

Technology advancements always make our jobs easier, and that’s true for call centers too. Investing in technology is one of the major aspects of best practices for call center management.

The employees will require the right tools and equipment to manage their calls and perform efficiently. Investment in the right technology equips you with such tools.

There are multiple things that you need to do with technology for call center management. For instance, you can use the Skill-Based Routing Technology to automatically shift the calls to an agent who is specifically skilled to handle the particular nature of the call. This helps offer better experiences to the customers.

Besides that, you can use technology for call monitoring, call recording, and other purposes too.

Such investments also become essential due to the inclination of people towards digital processes. Statistics reveal that 43% of customers remain willing to use call centers that offer bot facilities. Another 60% of customers look forward to using AI-based technology as it promptly resolves their issues.

So, using technology for call center management will prove to be beneficial in every manner.

Source

14. Set Up Rigorous Quality Assurance

The quality of your call center management operations matters a lot to the customers. Poor customer services have drastic and destructive results for your business.

A report from Zendesk suggests that 80% of customers will go ahead and do business with their competitors after just a single bad experience with customer service.

The image below will give a more comprehensive overview of the effects of bad quality of service at your call center.

Source

All these reasons make quality assurance extremely essential for efficient call center management. Set up multiple measures for quality assurance such as constant call monitoring and feedback, working on customer feedback to improve call quality, etc.

15. Strive for Continuous Improvement

Continuous improvement is the key to better management and growth. So, never miss out on that. It’s the best-ever practice that you’ll put in place for managing any of your business operations. So, as you work on implementing the best practices for call center management, make sure that you strive for continuous improvement along the path.

Top 3 Tools for Better Call Center Management

As you engage in using the best practices for call center management, some tools can help you well along the path. Given that, here’s a brief overview of the top tools for better call center management.

1. Appointlet

Appointlet is an excellent tool to help schedule your meetings and calls. Be it one-on-one meetings or a team call; you can schedule them without any hassles on Appointlet and have meetings in a smooth and seamless manner.

What makes it better is the integration with multiple apps that further extend its functionalities.

1. Email calendars to schedule the meetings and never miss them.
2. Web conferencing options that help host meetings on platforms like Zoom, Google Meet, etc.
3. Payment gateway integration to make it easier to collect payments from the customers.
4. Further integration with applications like Zapier and other CRMs for extended functionalities.

2. Sling

Sling is another efficient tool for quick and efficient employee scheduling without adding to the costs of your organization. Moreover, it helps with processing employee payrolls and tracking performance. All these functionalities make it a single platform to manage all the employee activities, thereby helping with enhanced call center management.

1. Schedule meetings and calls with employees
2. Track employee performance
3. Process employee payrolls
4. It works well on mobile as well as laptops.

3. Deputy

Deputy is a great tool if you’re looking forward to managing your call center operations by keeping track of employee activities and performance. The application will allow you to schedule employee meetings and offer a simple medium to fill employee timesheets and track performance. It also helps manage shifts and schedules of the employees in a hassle-free manner.

1. Schedule employee shifts within minutes.
2. Help employees fill timesheets and keep track of their activities and performance.
3. Process employee payroll.
4. Support better communication within the organization.

Are You Ready to Follow the Best Practices for Call Center Management?

So, that was all about the best practices for call center management along with details of some tools that you can use to aid these practices.

We hope that this article was helpful in understanding the ways to keep up with your call center management for enhanced customer services, and you’re all set to scale your business with these practices.