Most business owners know that call centers offer a number of cost, productivity, and efficiency advantages to their bottom lines. However, whether you’re just establishing your model or amping an existing one up, you’re also likely realizing that these advantages are attached to initial investments. The question today isn’t if you should invest in optimizing your communication methods… it’s how and where you should invest to make your contact center the most cost-effective model possible.
Four Easy Steps To Creating A Cost-Effective Call Center
It all begins with optimization of your resources, staffing, and customer service quality. How?
1. Jump On The Cloud
Cloud-based call centers operate for a fraction of the cost and effort of traditional on-site models. Cloud gives you the ability to integrate outside software for call centers software for call centers to amp up productivity and efficiency, and you can better manage and tailor your expenditures by choosing the exact pricing and payment plan needed for your business.
When it comes to agent productivity, this solution has tremendous potential. It can help establish an environment more conducive to consistent workflow processes, automate routine tasks that bog agents down, and improve the customer experience through features like ACD and IVR.
Even small communication disruptions to your call center can have major impacts on your business’s workflow and financials, right? Cloud solutions mitigate this issue. It’s a more reliable, secure, and versatile platform with strong disaster and disruption recovery abilities. Should connectivity be an issue, agents are able to stay mobile and tangible to customers by simply accessing the system from a different device.
The bottom line is that quality grows organically as agents can target their focus and process customers with consistency, speed, and efficiency. Customers are more satisfied, and satisfied customers are loyal customers and potential brand advocates and ambassadors.
2. Get The Right Features Out Of Your Software
If you want to reduce the cost per call, you’ll need to ensure your Cloud solution has the right dedicated features, including:
- Efficient automated outbound dialing to minimize wait times and allow focused conversations. Further tailor campaigns with predictive dialing to reach leads with minimal idle time, power dialing from your existing client database, and preview dialing to prep agents with the client’s info before starting the real call.
- Call center software should enable managers to monitor and report critical metrics surrounding productivity, including status and details of live calls, agent productivity numbers like talking time and not ready time, and KPIs like average wait times and abandoned call ratio.
- Inbound callback from the queue frees your system and the inbound caller up from idling on the line. Their spot is saved for callback, and you’ve reduced per call costs whilst also improving customer satisfaction.
- Intelligent call routing connects customers with the most appropriate agent, which minimizes call bouncing. This software can use communication history and any preassigned agents or projects to route callers. It can also route based on generalizations like language preferences, agent availability, agent skill level needed, department, and so forth. When customers get where they need to go from the start, their frustration is kept to a minimal and agents can more successfully navigate their workloads.
- Sales pipeline reporting to monitor conversion rates and other sales-related processes. You’ll be able to trace lead movement through each stage of the funnel to quickly and precisely identify where and how any freezing occurs.
3. Integrate With Other Business Apps
Business solutions work best when they’re working with, not against, each other. Integration with Cloud software allows for all your business data to be imported/exported smoothly and seamlessly without agents wasting time and risking user error moving back and forth between applications. The results are oil for your team’s workflow, direct cost savings for your business, and more impressed customers.
4.Optimize Agent Onboarding
Use Cloud solutions to expand your hiring horizons and to train and coach agents once they’re in the game. Training and coaching techniques become easier than ever with features like live and silent call monitoring, and some software vendors even include software training as you onboard agents.
Are you ready to create or amp up your call center to the most cost-effective model possible? Don’t assume that cost-effective means feature-lacking. With the right call center software you can have the best of both worlds.
