How To Improve Call Handling Efficiency

Improving call handling efficiency has the potential to significantly enhance the effectiveness of your call centre. The benefits of improving efficiency are clear: the more efficient your call handling is, the greater the number of customers you can serve. This can help you to increase sales and profitability and is also likely to result in an improvement to your bottom line. However, if a drive is made to reduce call duration arbitrarily, this can be to the detriment of customer satisfaction. As this is counter-intuitive from both a customer service and business perspective, it is critical that call handling efficiency is achieved through a measured and professional approach and this can be further enhanced and guided by the specialist customer service insight that a professional outsourced customer service call centre like Impact can deliver.

While it is helpful to understand the significant benefits that improving efficiency can bring and the risk of an unguided approach, the most significant challenge is how to improve call handling efficiency on a practical level. It is often relatively easy to create an overall strategy for driving call handling improvements, but it is far more challenging to implement it. In this article, we explore a number of ways that your business can improve call handling efficiency without affecting customer satisfaction.

Improving Call Handling Efficiency

Call handling efficiency is a great area to focus on improving, particularly if many other areas of your call centre operations are optimised and performing well. Driving efficiency improvements can involve many different areas of your call centre, from its call centre agents/advisors and supervisors through to call handling processes and internal/external systems. Whichever areas you decide to focus on, it is often surprising just how much progress can be made with relatively straightforward yet well-informed improvements.

When you can drive improvements across several areas, the cumulative impact on call handling efficiency should not be under-estimated. Imagine how many more customers your business could serve and how many more sales it may be able to secure with a relatively modest 10% improvement in call handling efficiency. The benefits are not just purely financial, as many of the ways in which you can improve efficiency will also enhance the customer experience, which in turn increases customer satisfaction and retention.

Whether you have an in-house call centre or an outsourced call centre, there is almost always scope to increase efficiency when it comes to call handling and benefit from the positive results that it so often brings.

Trained And Knowledgeable Call Centre Agents/Advisors

Call centre agents/advisors are at the heart of the customer experience and play a crucial role in the delivery of exceptional service. In order to improve call handling efficiency, it is important that agents are equipped with the necessary skills and expertise to confidently interact with customers. While many agents may bring skills and experience from roles inside or outside the call centre industry, the most effective way to develop and nurture agents so they can operate at their full potential is through world-class agent training. By training agents in service-related skills and processes as well as product/service knowledge, you can equip and empower them to perform at their best and identify efficiency improvements.

Investing in the training of your call centre agents is worthwhile as it will improve the quality of the customer experience. Once their service skills are improved, they will also become best placed to manage customer interactions in the most efficient way, which can contribute to overall call handling efficiency improvements. Delivering efficiency improvements in a way that does not compromise customer satisfaction requires careful judgement and skill. This is something that can be taught via agent training, making it an effective way of driving efficiency gains.

In addition to training in core skills, it is important that your call centre agents are equipped with excellent knowledge of the products and services they work with. Having in-depth knowledge allows agents to interact with customers more fluently and offer higher quality solutions. When a customer has a common query or question about a specific product or service, the agent will know how to help or where to find the necessary information. It is therefore possible to manage each interaction efficiently and ensure that the time taken to manage them is proportionate to the nature of the customer service query.

Having Calls Quality Checked By Supervisors

Maintaining a quality customer experience is not only a challenge in terms of service delivery, it also presents efficiency challenges too. It may be the case that some call centre agents are spending too much time on a certain type of customer interaction, which can undermine efficiency. This issue becomes especially acute as your call volumes increase and each agent is managing more customer interactions. Achieving a level of standardisation across customer interactions is an effective way to ensure that efficiencies are made without undermining the customer experience.

In order to ensure that call quality is maintained, and efficiencies are gained, it is important that calls are quality checked by supervisors periodically. Call quality checks should not be a performance review. Instead, they are most effective when they are set up as a coaching process where the supervisor’s role is to coach and help each call centre agent to perform at their best. By providing regular feedback to each agent in a supportive and helpful way, they will be empowered to make improvements that can make all the difference to overall call handling efficiency.

At Impact, we dedicate resources to supporting all our call centre agents with on-going training and development, so they are empowered to perform at their best. Our agents are provided with professional coaching, which includes regular feedback to support them in improving their call handling. We coach and advise our agents on how to be more efficient with the different systems that they use, how to make best use of processes and how to use soft skills to handle different types of callers. The impact of quality checking and supportive coaching for our call centre agents is transformative and it helps us to deliver world-class service for some of the UK’s leading brands.

Streamline Processes

Clear processes and procedures are essential to the operation of a busy outsourced call centre as they help to maintain service quality across teams and at times of high call volumes. While carefully constructed processes provide helpful direction and useful steps for agents to follow, they can become cumbersome and unnecessarily complex over time. This is especially the case if they were developed a while ago and they have not evolved or been adapted to support business changes. In some cases, they can become a barrier to service quality and efficiency. This can cause a range of issues, including frustration for your call centre agent teams and the customers that they serve.

Taking the time to review your processes can uncover valuable efficiencies that you may have otherwise overlooked. It can be something as simple as removing a process step that is no longer necessary due to business changes or advances in technology, or as complex as re-designing an entire process to make it more efficient. In many cases, the most effective suggestions will come from either your customer service agents or the customers they serve. By providing opportunities for both your agents and customers to provide feedback on processes and make suggestions as to how they can be streamlined, you can make significant progress on your journey to greater call handling efficiency.

At Impact, we value suggestions and contributions from all members of our team and the customers that they serve. By providing an open and supportive call centre environment where everyone is valued, we are able to proactively streamline our clients’ processes and our own. This regularly results in significant efficiency gains that benefit our teams, clients and their customers.

Collaborate With Partners

Whichever sector your call centre serves and whoever your customers are, no exceptional call centre operates in isolation. Collaboration is very much key to the success of call centres that handle high volumes of interactions and scale to meet growing demand. By collaborating effectively and proactively with key partners, you can often uncover some of the greatest efficiency gains that can be made. The partners that you collaborate with can be service delivery partners, suppliers and the end customer. Partners often bring a different perspective on service delivery, processes and procedures, which is invaluable as another angle can lead to different efficiency savings being identified.

As a professional outsourced call centre that is committed to delivering world-class outsourced customer service and outbound call center services, we take the time to collaborate closely with our partners. We recognise that when we do this, we can deliver exceptional service to not only our clients but also our clients’ customers. While significant call handling efficiencies may not be immediately apparent, it is often possible to identify small incremental process improvements or changes that can be made. When small changes are made over time, their impact compounds to culminate in great efficiency gains.

Improve Agent/Advisor Access To Information

Professionally trained call centre agents often have a wealth of knowledge but even the most knowledgeable agents will need to refer to information when managing customer interactions. Whether it is to help them answer a new question or query that has not been addressed before or confirm a policy or procedure that is in place, being able to access the right information quickly and easily ensures that calls can be handled efficiently. As the number of systems required to deliver exceptional service is ever-increasing, accessing key information at a glance can become more challenging.

Improving access to information for your call centre agents can involve making a wide range of improvements, from changing existing systems through to digitising data and information that is in a physical form. It is surprising just how much important information is not available in a digital format and the amount of time that call centre agents can spend trying to filter through it. Whether you decide to change your system to one that is more user-friendly and suited to your business requirements or digitise knowledge into a knowledge base, improving access to information will deliver significant benefits.

At Impact, we are always striving to raise the bar in every aspect of our outsourced call centre. Helping our call centre agents to access information is an important part of this. Our in-house IT department are adept at improving information access and have developed intelligent dashboards and custom systems to support our agents in doing what they do best, delivering exceptional service to our clients’ customers.

Integrate Systems To Avoid Silos

Systems that operate in silos result in unnecessary data duplication, loss of efficiency and can even cause service quality issues. When your call centre agents are forced to input the same data into multiple systems, a task that could take less time is likely to take much longer depending on the number of systems that must be updated. Furthermore, there is an increased risk of incorrect or out of date information, as each system will need to be supplied with the correct information and updated by a call centre agent. The more systems that they need to update, the greater the risk of data issues. In addition to this, unnecessarily cumbersome data entry across multiple systems may distract them from their core focus, helping customers and providing world-class service.

By integrating systems to avoid silos, everyday efficiency gains can be made by your agents/advisors and the time that they save can be used to serve more customers or provide even more exceptional service. There are many ways to achieve system integration and avoid silos, including switching to a system that can deliver multiple functions in one place such as customer relationship management (CRM) and order management & tracking. Where such system changes are not possible, it may be possible to develop a custom dashboard or dedicated interface for data entry which allows an agent to enter all the information from a customer interaction on a single interface and for this to be automatically sent to each system.

We have extensive expertise and experience in integrating systems for clients to deliver greater call handling efficiency and streamline workflows for our call centre agents. Impact’s in-house IT team are ready to help ensure that your systems support your call centre operations and your goal of delivering exceptional service to customers.

Automate Simple Requests

The ever-advancing developments in artificial intelligence (AI) provide a wealth of opportunities for automation across all business functions, including within your UK call centre operations. Instead of relying on your call centre agents to complete repetitive and simple tasks, why not draw on the power of AI and its powerful automations to take care of simple requests? This can free up your agents’ valuable time, so they can concentrate on complex requests that require human input and insight. AI technology is becoming increasingly intelligent and adept at managing requests with chatbots, online knowledge bases and self-service customer portals all playing a key role in the delivery of great service. When automation can complete a task equally as well as or better than an agent, there is an opportunity to drive efficiency improvements.

At Impact, we are passionate about delivering world-class service using the best available technology. While we believe that human interactions remain key to delivering great service, we recognise that there is a place for technology including AI. Our UK call centre agents use technology intelligently to enhance service delivery and deliver efficient yet exceptional service to our clients’ customers.

Ensure That Agents Are Clear In Their Communication

Every customer interaction is different and the most effective call handling agents are able to manage each interaction with confidence and communicate clearly with the customer. When a customer service agent is unclear or a request is ambiguous, it can cause unnecessary confusion for the customer, which then takes time to resolve. The skill of directing the conversation during a customer interaction without dominating it takes time to attain, yet it has the potential to unlock valuable efficiency gains.

As one of the leading customer service outsourcing call centres in the UK, we take the time to train and coach our agents, so they have all the required skills to communicate clearly with our clients’ customers. Our dedication to communication training has delivered excellent results and driven efficiency improvements for some of the UK’s leading brands.