Retaining Customers with Stellar Inbound Call Center Services and Practices

The call center is the front line and starting point for customers’ experiences; they can either choose to continue their journeys with your company or quit cold turkey. This essentially makes your agents the face of your company.

So how do you ensure the best quality of customer service in your inbound call center?

Foster an Atmosphere of Teamwork and Consistency

Two of the most important attributes for call center success are a sense of togetherness and consistency of services delivered. One way to help build a sense of teamwork is to keep a low call agent-to-supervisor ratio. This ratio ensures more individual attention and training for agents from supervisors, shaping an intimate work environment that is competitive yet team-oriented.

Capitalize on Employee Strengths and Training

Once you have the analytic tools to measure what agents excel in what areas, you can leverage skills-based call routing to ensure that calls are being sent to subject matter experts mostly likely to be able to resolve them. Combining the power of call metrics and cutting-edge technology solutions ultimately guarantees that the most complex calls go to your most effective agents.

Accurately Measure Agent Effectiveness

As you work to improve your call center, you need visibility into what is working well and what might need some tweaking. Backed by the right call center solutions provider, you’ll get metrics like Average Handle Time (AHT) and Calls Handled per Hour, and the all-important response rate that easily spell out how well your scripts and procedures are working. Just how important are analytics? Consider that companies that use them generate 73 percent more sales than those who do not according to IBM. Keep in mind, however, that while increasing sales is a huge business objective, companies that turn a blind eye to the power of analytics are squandering the easiest way to reach that goal.

These services and others can help improve your agent-customer relationships, boost retention and reduce its mortal enemy—customer churn. In fact, the impact of customer churn on your call center can be so devastating that research shows it can cost eight times (or more) as much to acquire a new customer compared to keeping an existing one.

The fact is that today’s consumers aren’t interested in hearing the reasons why they aren’t getting their issues resolved—they simply move on to a competitor.