Call Center Management Featured Article
Turning the Call Center into a Profit Center
Many companies view the contact center as a kind of necessary evil – a cost center that can’t be avoided. A few companies, however, manage to turn their contact centers into profitable enterprises that sell. What’s the difference in how these two types of companies run their contact center?
Successful companies are service-oriented, and don’t take the attitude that what counts most is getting customers off the phone as quickly as possible. While you certainly don’t want to encourage agents to have long, leisurely conversations about the weather with customers, you also don’t want to rush customers off the phone before their issues are resolved.
Some ways that successful contact centers can add to the company’s bottom line include:
Focus on quality. Rather than score agents on how many customers they serve per hour, focus on how many problems they solve per hour by tracking (for example) first-call resolution or customer satisfaction. Rushing a customer off the phone only to have him or her call back one or more times because the issue was unresolved doesn’t save you any money, and it creates customer experience problems.
Teach agents to cross-sell and upsell. Agents skilled in the art of selling can turn customer queries into sales opportunities. Help them learn the skills necessary for selling a customer into a higher tier of service, for example, or signing up for auto-delivery of supplies or replacements.
Cut down on administrative time. Many agents are so bogged down with after-call work and cumbersome desktop solutions, they spend most of their time logging their calls, entering data and clicking through multiple screens. Streamline your desktop administrative processes to cut down on the amount of time agents are spending on non-call activities.
Consider cloud-based contact center solutions. Cloud-based solutions require no upfront investment for hardware and software, and you can do a lot more with fewer IT resources. With cloud-based solutions, contact centers pay a monthly subscription fee that also covers training, support and troubleshooting, maintenance and upgrades, and they pay for only what resources they need.
Use a modern workforce management solution. By ditching the spreadsheets and automating workforce management, companies can gain immediate cost savings from improved schedule adherence. (See Monet Software’s (News - Alert) white paper, “How to Calculate Cost Savings and ROI of Workforce Management Software.”)
Edited by Maurice Nagle