Regardless of whether you’re running a big corporation or a small business, employee productivity is important. When a workforce can make improvements in a short amount of time, they can have a significant influence on the overall success of a business.
In fact, the more efficient your employees are, the more successful your business will be. While everyone agrees that productivity is important, it can be difficult to implement the right changes. With that in mind, here are some proven ways to boost agent productivity in your call center.
Move to the cloud
Recent technological advancements have made the cloud even more business-friendly. Moving to the cloud provides a way to avoid investing in volatile technology, and allows businesses to focus more on core competencies.
Cloud-based software offers rapid delivery, instant upgrades, and integrations with other cloud-based platforms. It also provides tools for user management and tenant individual functionality.
Since the cloud is becoming increasingly safe and user-friendly, more and more businesses are opting to integrate cloud communications into their business model. Cloud-based communications are key for call centers looking to reduce overhead costs and boost agent productivity by hiring remote agents.
Cloud-based communications enable agents to interact with customers the same way they would from a real-life office. In addition, hiring remote agents allows you to hire beyond a defined geographic location. Therefore, you can choose the best remote agents for your call center, rather than just hiring agents who live nearby.
Building a remote workforce allows you to offer more flexible scheduling hours and reduce in-house staff, while remote agents have the freedom to work from the place they feel most productive.
Invest in IVRs
It’s easy to allocate most of your call center budget toward keeping existing processes and systems running. However, in order to expand, it’s crucial to allocate more resources toward improving agent support and investing in better resources for call centers. When agents are given the right tools, they can finish the job happily and more efficiently.
That’s where interactive response systems (IVRs) come in. In conjunction with artificial intelligence (AI), IVRs access previous customer interactions while detecting voice and tone to offer a completely personalized experience. IVRs utilize a cloud based predictive dialer to automatically route and connect customers to live agents.
Rather than simply add customers to a lengthy queue, IVR uses interaction histories to route customers to the agent best suited to resolve their issues. Investing in IVRs saves agents time and allows them to make significantly more calls while working more efficiently.
Cloud based predictive dialers have also been shown to maximize call success rates and simplify list management.
Provide options for self-service
With the increasing prevalence of technology in the realm of customer service, more customers are beginning to demand self-service options. Integrating self-service options into your customer service model boosts agent productivity by eliminating the need for agents to solve simple issues and repeat monotonous tasks, like routing calls.
Research on customer satisfaction has shown that customers want self-service options that do not undermine customer support. Offering effortless self-service experiences for customers can also increase customer satisfaction rates and expand your current customer base.
To incorporate more tools for self-service, consider providing a page of online tutorial videos for customers. You can include a list of frequently asked questions regarding your products or services, as well as chatbots, virtual agents, and troubleshooting guides. Self-service options allow customers to solve issues independently and allow agents to devote more attention to solving more complex issues.
Boosting agent productivity in your call center will ultimately help you save time and money while creating a better work environment for your agents.