In many MeloTel blog entries of past, we’ve highlighted just how tough a job it is to be a phone agent. We’ve pointed out that, in many call centres, employees make and take hundreds of calls each day. By doing so, however, we don’t mean to gloss over the importance of the call centre manager. Naturally, it requires quite a lot of a person to manage a team of phone agents in a call centre. So how do you know if you’re doing a good job?
Here are three signs you’re running an awesome call centre:
1. There are short wait times for customers in the queue.
If it’s one thing that all customers have in common, it’s that they love immediate customer service. No one likes waiting. And in today’s fast-paced world, sitting and waiting for help is practically unacceptable. Remember that most consumers hop online to discover information about the brands they’re considering supporting. When they call your company, it’s vital they are able to get live agents on the phone right away.
According to Dylon Mills on Jacada.com, this is accomplished by appropriate staffing. “While overestimating demand can lead to overstaffing and wasted resources, underestimating can be just as problematic as it leads to understaffing, which then leads to long wait times in queues,” he writes, “The result of this is frustrated customers and burned-out agents who now have to dedicate a portion of the call to caller complaints about hold times.”
2. Your team provides timely service.
Did we mention that customers don’t like to wait around? Once your phone agents are on the phone with their callers, it’s important they’re able to provide service in a timely fashion. There’s no sense in rushing. Being thorough and accurate will always be important. However, if your customers have to spend more time on the phone than they’d like, it won’t make for high customer satisfaction results.
“Quality agents should be fast and efficient,” insists Shauna Geraghty on Talkdesk.com, “They should work quickly without sacrificing the quality of their work. This is important to your bottom line because the more callers an agent can handle, the fewer agents you need to keep your call center running smoothly. It’s also important to the callers themselves.”
3. You have strong call monitoring practices.
One of your toughest and most important jobs is making sure that each and every member of your staff is given the opportunity to improve. It’s up to you to monitor calls in order to pinpoint areas where improvements are necessary. By listening to the calls of your phone agents, you’ll be able to offer accurate feedback during your feedback sessions. They should all lead to improved performances.
“Call quality is a crucial customer-centric performance metric that can be utilized in all contact centers, and helps to measure how successful an agent is in dealing with the customers,” says Mills, “It is typically evaluated through the recording and monitoring of agent interactions with customers and utilizes a scoring system based on a list of criteria that a call center feels indicates a quality experience from the customer’s perspective.”
At MeloTel, we’d argue that there is no better call monitoring technology available than our Monitor/Whisper Control Panel. To learn how your call centre can take advantage of it, please give us a call at 1-888-MELOTEL or use the Live Chat feature on our website!
