There’s a lot that goes into creating a call center that fulfills its role of improving customer experience and increasing satisfaction with your company, services and offerings. Whether you’re building a call center from the ground up for a startup, revamping a call center for an existing company, or just looking for ways to optimize the performance of your existing call center, these three keys should be at the core of your efforts to maximize the impact of your call center on your bottom line.

  1. A Well-Trained, Properly Sized Staff

 

Your staff are the heart and soul of your call center. You can institute as many detailed protocols and fancy, high-tech tools as you want, but none of that will matter if your staff isn’t up to par. The biggest way to ensure that this is the case is to offer robust and detailed training for all new staff members and continuing education for existing call center staff. Maintaining a strong training program has numerous benefits, from improving the customer experience to reducing agent attrition, and it should never be overlooked. What’s more, it is critical that you are staffing the correct number of agents at any given time. Have too many agents and you risk wasting money. Have too few agents and you risk overwhelm, burnout, and long wait times. Data and forecasting tools should be used to determine the ideal number of agents you need in your call center.

  1. Robust Company-Wide Communication Channels

 

Your call center should not exist on an island (even if you are outsourcing it). At the very least, your agents should be knowledgeable about every department in the company, or every department about which they might need to speak with a customer. This knowledge will empower agents to solve problems creatively and lead to increased customer satisfaction. But even better would be giving your agents the tools to communicate freely with those other departments so they can request information and avoid transferring customers from department to department. When this collaboration and communication exists behind the scenes, it prevents customers from having to explain their situation to more than one person and improves their experience.

  1. Stellar Call Center Technology

 

Technology is incredibly important to the smooth and efficient running of your call center, especially if some or all of your agents are working remotely. In these cases, not only are they using the technology to do their jobs, but they are also using it to communicate with other members of the team and other departments at the company. While there are lots of different call center platforms out there, certain characteristics are a must. First, you most likely want a cloud-based call center platform, which is much cheaper than a premise-based system and can be accessed by all of your agents no matter where they are. Next, you want a system that you can easily integrate with the other tools and platforms your company uses and through which your agents can communicate effectively. Finally, features like an easy-to-edit IVR, dynamic scripting and detailed data and analytics tools will help you collect the information you need to optimize the running of your call center.

CallShaper has all these features, and more. To find out how we can help you build a successful call center, request a demo today.