Why call centres fail

Putting the wrong people in the wrong roles can handicap your center for months or years to come. Failure to plan for growth or seasonality. Nothing is static, companies evolve over time and the reasons our customer contact us also evolve.

Organic growth in contact volume may be linked to organizational growth, new markets, products or services. Increased focus on ecommerce can increase seasonal spiked and volumes. If the center planning has not taken these factors into consideration, you can find yourself without the ability to scale the center to support the customer needs.

Both of these scenarios are disruptive and will reduce service quality while often increasing costs. Failure to understand the labor market. In a call or contact center labor is the number one expense. Center also often have high staff turnover, both externally and internally. The location selected for the center must be sustainable and the labor costs and budgets need to be realistic.

Failure to seek guidance and expert advice. There is certainly a cost associated with retaining an expert to guide you through the process of designing and implementing a new call or contact center, but there is also a cost for not doing so. We have seen organizations select technologies only to have to remove and replace them within months, build and then shutter center locations due to staffing issues, deliver degraded services because their budget was incorrectly set in the first place and be hampered by center staff and leadership without the skills, competencies or training to excel in the role.

February 6, at pm. Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. If callers end up having to speak to several advisors regarding a single enquiry, the customer experience becomes diluted and satisfaction levels plummet. Michelle Black, a call centre manager, reckons a good way to overcome poor FCR rates is to engage in root-cause analysis — that is, to investigate the reasons customers ring a call centre — and to use that information to fix specific problems at source.

Another step, she says, is to build a knowledge base of questions as and when they arise, populating them with suitable responses. Much of this poor customer service will likely include customers feeling undervalued, no resolution to customer queries and long hold times — among many other possible reasons.

As is the case with advisor attrition, it is best to tackle customer churn before it becomes an issue. To do this, ensure you have a robust customer retention policy in place. This retention team will include advisors who have been trained in complaints and objection handling.

These might include the ability to sanction refunds, better payment plans or complimentary goods or services. Suspect that the biggest problem is lack of engagement by C-level execs in customer experience. Rather than chasing the lowest cost solution, start from looking at what the customer wants. Processes that supports the business and not necessarily the customer.

It would be useful to have some possible solutions to these problems. This style of writing could appear very frustrating or come accross as a rant with no solution? The Jobcentre has a current but steadily reducing target time of 5 minutes 18 seconds in which to get rid of — I mean help its JSA customers, most of which can sometimes be taken up with security checks, sending emails and keeping records.

I wholly agree with Richard, engaging your team in the contact centre will resolve many of the issues listed — and I know because I do it time and time again across many different centres and organisations. A focus on great quality will, over time, improve performance against volume-based measures like abandoned calls, productivity and service levels.

Focussing just on the volume measures will bring those alone — and make them harder to deliver as staff leave, become unproductive, focus on your targets and not their customers etc etc. The challenge faced by most contact centre leaders is that there is an impatience to show how many calls are handled and how productive their teams are.

Turning around the situations above takes good planning, commitment by all levels to deliver and tenacity. Contact centre managers that are driven mostly by numbers and rarely by customer and staff experience will face every problem listed above.

It happens. Talk about turning a resource into a wasteland of negativity. Yes, call centers are driven by numbers. Business itself is driven by numbers. Why would one piece of business be different?

At my call center we can identify issues with our reps by using Metrics such as timeouts, schedule adherence if they stay on platform taking calls vs walking around off platform not taking calls , how fast they answer the calls etc. This is only part of a solution of us as we know who is not doing their part of the job.

As some others have pointed out, the Customer experience is what trumps everything. This means when the customer calls, they get something that tells them their issue is resolved at that point in time. The idea is to prevent having to follow up with the customer at a later point in time. I have found that having good communication throughout your department on the processes helps significantly. Now that all these problems with customer service centers have been set out, start to focus now on the solutions.

The problems may be there but it is important to make things better so as to help your business be even better. I have worked in a call center before. Though I was not with them long, the company I was with had a proven and rather old 20 yrs or so system to promote and train management candidates. Though my generation is all about the here and now, it is nice to have the ability normally through hard work to move yourself up the corporate ladder.

I applaud them for this initiative but this field was not what I loved and can say that the experience I gained was invaluable. Most companies spend less on their customer service then they do on their Christmas parties, or the salary of one senior executive.

Great post. It involves some of the great resources. It is really a post to bookmark. Call center as we all know revolves around the calls from customers. The efficiency of call center lies in its ability to satisfy customers with the accurate answers to their queries.

Internal processes which are better replaced with technology or have been created as a workaround for a problem so long ago that the original reason for it has been forgotten and in most causes is no longer their. Related Articles. What Are the Biggest Problems? Paul Weald. Ben Dale-Gough. James Le Roth. Ken Hitchen. Keith Gait. Michelle Black. Related Reports. Also, have you deployed an omni-channel environment to meet your customer where they want to be met?

Customer service agents needs to know what the company expects and what management holds them accountable for. When a customer calls, he expects a two-way conversation. The customer might also feel like he is wasting his time. In addition to having a clear and brief script, you should also make your greetings short. Call centers need to be industry-specific. This means they need to know the customers of that particular industry and speak in the same way that the company would.

A follow-up has the power to turn an unhappy customer into a customer for life. However, automated follow-ups should be avoided, as customers typically prefer to speak to an actual person when resolving conflict. To cut costs, call centers will often evaluate employees based on how fast they complete calls rather than the level of service they provide to customers.

Such an evaluation puts unnecessary stress on the staff. This can lead to high turnover rates and in turn more costs in recruiting and training. Often, companies will hire representatives who are under-qualified and emotionally-detached and then provide them with inadequate training.