Call Center Management Featured Article
The Right Technology Helps Call Center Managers Manage Instead of Putting Out Fires
There are few professionals with their hands more full than call center managers. The call center is a dynamic, busy place, and operations move at the speed of sound. At the same time, however, it’s critical that managers be in touch with service levels and key performance indicators at every moment of the day, keeping schedules in adherence down to 15 minute intervals, in some cases.
There are number of elements to manage within the call center. While sticking to the schedule and ensuring agents are at their seats taking calls or other contacts is the foremost, there is no shortage of other issues to keep a handle on. For this reason and many others, it is recommended that call centers adopt an easily integrated series of solutions for their various needs rather than a platform that is cobbled together legacy equipment that may (or…more likely…may not) work well together.
Hosted solutions excel in this area. Contact centers can receive precisely the functionality they need without having to waste money or brain power on features they don’t. As the needs of the contact center change, the hosted solution can be adjusted to change with it.
Hosted PBX (News - Alert) solutions provider press8 telecom recently blogged about how a well-designed cloud-based PBX can improve operations and help managers stay in touch with all elements of the call center’s business and at the same time balance the workload so that agents aren’t getting too frazzled and customers aren’t spending a lot of time waiting on hold.
“A call center must be able to support interaction with customers in the manner that the customers prefer: phone, email, Web chat, or voice over IP (VoIP)/voice chat,” according to the company. “With a VoIP hosted PBX, you can setup a 'call me back' feature on your Web site and a call will immediately be initiated with the caller and a call center employee.”
By using a callback solution, managers can ensure that call volumes and other contacts remain steadier throughout the day, which gives them the time they need to ensure they are hitting all the right places that need their attention.
A VoIP-based hosted PBX will direct a caller to the employee who has had the most amount of time between calls and to those who are not on the phone, which reduces hold times greatly, keeping customer satisfaction high. Desktop integration ensures that agents have all the information they require in one place, without having to toggle back and forth between too many applications. This leads to reduced errors (and correcting errors is one of the call center manager’s biggest jobs) and faster handle times.
Finally, hosted solutions can provide a wealth of information via analytics, which allows call center managers to understand when a metric is going out of whack. More importantly, it can help managers understand why the problem is occurring and take real-time steps to mitigate it.
While managing a call center may seem like a thankless task, having the proper technology to underpin the entire organization can make all the difference in the world, and leave managers to do what they’re supposed to do: manage.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi