Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Callback Solutions Can Help Ensure Schedule Adherence and Customer Satisfaction
It’s no secret to anyone who has worked in a contact center that customers have no patience today. They have no patience for telling their stories more than once, and they have no patience for transfers to other departments. Above all, however, they have entirely lost their patience with waiting on hold.
Putting customers on hold for longer than a few seconds is a bit like telling them, “Your time doesn’t matter.” Customers perceive that they are less-than-valuable to a company (despite what the hold music might be telling them.) These disgruntled customers won’t hesitate to jump ship quickly to a competitor if they’re not convinced they are truly being valued.
Contact centers, of course, can’t handle every call immediately. If they could, they’d have to remain so overstaffed all the time that the companies they support would go broke very quickly. Scheduling the right number of agents is both an art and a science, but no one can get it right every time, especially with unforeseen factors causing call spikes (like weather conditions). So if you can’t keep workers on hold, and if you can’t overstaff the contact center, what do you do?
For starters, you should keep several robust self-service channels available to customers so they can help themselves. But in the event they still need to speak with a representative, ensure they can schedule a convenient time to talk. Callback technology lets customers choose a time to be called by a contact center representative. It’s a great way to take pressure of the queue during times of high volume, and it helps balance out the stress to agents, according to a recent guest blog post by Hannah Spruce writing for Fonolo (News - Alert).
“Call-back solutions could be instrumental in creating a positive working environment for your staff,” she wrote. “It has the capacity to motivate staff, decrease stress levels, and empower employees to make their days more rewarding and more productive.”
It’s also a great way for contact centers to stick to their schedules. Unexpected call volume spikes can throw off the best prepared schedules, which causes schedule adherence to slip for the rest of the day.
“A call-back system can reduce hectic peak periods so the working day is more manageable for call center staff,” wrote Spruce. “This levelling out creates a better working environment and reduces the level of employee burnout. [It also] tends to lead to a higher customer satisfaction rate, which, as any call center operative knows, leads to a higher staff satisfaction rate. Customers that feel valued and haven’t been kept waiting in a lengthy phone queue are more likely to feel relaxed. Which in turn, means they are more likely to respect your employees. It’s a positive cycle.”
When agents call customers back at a more convenient time, the customer is more likely to be calm and cooperative, the agent is less frazzled and there is an added bonus: the agent is in a better position to start the conversation with background information about the customer, eliminating the need for long explanations. (As in, “I see you purchased our XYZ Unit back in February. How can I help you?”) It’s a feature that yields a number of benefits to the contact center, the customer and the individual agent. It’s a way for contact centers to even out their call volume and make the best possible use of down-time so agents are neither swamped nor bored, but instead able to work at a steady pace throughout the day. It’s also a great way to tell customers, “We care about not wasting your time.”
Edited by Stefania Viscusi