Call centers are large, labor-intensive operations with lots of moving parts. You need to handle a large team of agents and frequently grumpy customers while chasing lofty performance goals. Managing such a complex operation is challenging, but following call center best practices can set you up for success.
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Call center best practices are a set of management practices and business philosophies that help you manage your call center successfully. They’re basically good habits that can help you maintain high service quality and keep your customers happy. This guide will take you through some of these best practices and how you can implement them. Let’s get into it!
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Best Practices To Follow
Good call center management requires a two-pronged approach. First, you need good management practices to ensure a streamlined workflow. Second, you need to ensure your call center agents are following good call handling practices. These two things lead to higher customer satisfaction scores and more lead conversions.
Best Practices for Call Center Management
First, let’s look at some best practices for call center management.
1. Build More Efficient Workflows
In 2022, Hubspot found that lack of prioritization, too many tools and lack of time are some of the biggest challenges faced by most organizations in customer service. The primary cause of these issues was an absence of systematic workflows. Inefficient workflows waste your resources, especially time. Creating well-structured workflows and training your staff to follow them can help you use your resources more effectively.
Good call center software includes all the tools you need for call handling, workforce management, campaign management, data security and reporting. Using a single call center management platform and integrating it with your CRM system is more effective than using too many individual tools.
2. Use Automation Where Possible
Manual work can be time-consuming, tedious and prone to errors. While fully automated call centers are still a pipe dream, using software and AI tools to automate some of the more routine call center processes can help you improve efficiency. This allows you to come closer to creating what McKinsey calls the “superhuman agent.”
Automatic call distribution (ACD) systems and auto-dialers are helpful tools for call center automation. ACD automatically routes incoming calls to available agents based on time of day, agent skill level, type of call and other predetermined parameters. Auto-dialers can eliminate the need for manual dialing, improve connection rates, boost agent occupancy rates and improve conversions in outbound call centers.
3. Maintain a Clear Hierarchy
Call centers are labor-intensive organizations. Maintaining a clear hierarchy in the workforce is important for managing large teams efficiently.
In general, the staff in a call center consists of agents, team leaders or supervisors, managers and executives. Executives are responsible for overall strategy, while managers handle the more day-to-day processes. Under managers, there are team leaders or supervisors who manage teams of individual agents. Agents make up the base of the hierarchy and are like the foundation of your call center — they’re the people your customers interact with most.
Having this hierarchy in place is not only important for workforce management, but it also ensures that the day-to-day business processes flow efficiently and that there’s accountability at all levels.
4. Foster a Positive Work Culture
Working in customer service is not easy, and dealing with grumpy customers all day can be very emotionally draining on agents. This makes it even more important to foster a positive work culture within your organization. According to Gallup, ensuring employee engagement and happiness leads to 10% higher customer satisfaction, 18% higher productivity and 23% higher profitability.
Some steps you can take to foster a positive work culture include putting more focus on training, working together towards growth rather than finding someone to blame, more incentives for employees and more frequent team-building activities.
5. Track KPIs Regularly
Keeping up with your call center’s performance allows you to identify shortcomings in your processes and create strategies for improvement. KPIs or key performance indicators are data points that help you objectively measure how your call center is performing in key areas. Customer satisfaction, first response time and agent attrition rates are some common call center KPIs.
The best practice with KPIs is to monitor them diligently over a period of time, analyze them to gain actionable insights and then create strategies to improve.
6. Prioritize Agents
Agents are the most important part of any call center. They’re the ones who directly interact with customers and represent your brand. Properly training and empowering agents is critical. However, a report by Zendesk found that less than 30% of customer service agents feel empowered to do their jobs well.
The report identified inadequate training, heavy workloads, lack of clear career progression and lack of respect within the company as some major factors that lead to agents being dissatisfied with their jobs. Identifying these and similar pitfalls within your company and addressing them can help you empower your agents and improve customer service.
7. Use Call Monitoring Tools
Call monitoring tools help you supervise agents and ensure service quality. These include call recording and transcription tools that can help you go over and audit past calls for quality assurance or training purposes. You can also use tools like call whisper to coach and assist agents without letting the customer know. Call barge is another tool which allows supervisors to take over a call from an agent if they feel it’s not going well.
These tools are especially useful for training rookie agents on the job and for performance management.
Best Practices for Customer Handling
These are some best practices you and your agents can follow to ensure you’re providing exemplary customer service.
1. Maintain Proper Call Etiquette
The most important part of agent training is learning how to maintain proper call etiquette when talking to customers.
At the beginning of each call, greet the customer and introduce yourself. Remain positive and answer customer queries enthusiastically. Try to resolve queries in the first call if possible. If you’re going to put the customer on hold, communicate that, and also let them know about how long the wait will be. Before ending the call, ask the customer for confirmation that their issue has been fully resolved and that they don’t require any more help.
2. Keep a Friendly Tone
66% of customers surveyed by Zendesk in 2023 said that a single bad interaction with customer service can ruin their entire day. While customer service can definitely be emotionally draining, it’s important for agents to maintain a friendly tone and avoid sounding frustrated or unhappy.
Call center scripting can help agents maintain a consistent and positive attitude in their conversations. You can also use AI tools to analyze customer sentiments during calls and direct agents to respond accordingly.
3. Aim To Reduce Wait Time
No one likes to wait in line, least of all customers who are in a hurry to get their problems resolved. Long wait times can be a factor in purchasing decisions. 48% of consumers surveyed by Salesforce said that they’ve switched brands in favor of companies with shorter wait times. Meanwhile, 83% of customers say they expect to engage with someone immediately after contacting a company.
Automatic call routing using ACD software is a good way to reduce wait times and avoid dropped calls. You can also set up a knowledge base to enable customers to resolve simpler issues on their own, reducing call volumes. AI-based chatbots can also reduce customer wait times and agent workloads by answering simple questions and routing more complex queries appropriately.
4. Foster a Customer-first Mindset
The primary focus at any call center should be the convenience and satisfaction of the customers. To that end, you need to ensure that your operational workflows are designed to reduce wait times, minimize customer effort scores and improve overall customer experience. Additionally, it’s important to train your employees to take customer issues seriously and do their best to resolve them in a timely manner.
5. Set up a Knowledge Base
In 2022, Zendesk found that 89% of customers preferred companies that allowed them to find answers to their queries online without having to contact a customer service agent. This is good news because it gives organizations an easy way of improving customer experience while simultaneously reducing agent workloads.
Knowledge bases allow customers to troubleshoot their issues themselves and help them feel empowered. It can also be a useful resource for agents who might need to refresh their knowledge.
6. Provide Omni-channel Support
Customers today interact with companies on a wide variety of different platforms, including social media, email, phone and text. They also expect to receive support through their preferred channels. The Zendesk report mentioned above found that 93% of customers preferred to purchase from companies that offered customer service through the channel of their choice.
Many ticket management platforms come with features that allow you to consolidate customer support requests from multiple different channels and address them through a single platform. Providing omni-channel support allows your organization to remain competitive in a rapidly changing customer service landscape.
7. Use Customer Satisfaction Surveys
Customer satisfaction is probably the most important KPI for any customer service team. Customer satisfaction surveys, or CSAT surveys, allow you to measure this KPI in a quantifiable way. These are short surveys that customers can take at the end of the call and provide feedback on the quality of the service they just received.
CSAT surveys allow you to monitor service quality and take steps to improve your call handling processes based on customer feedback, so you know exactly where you’re doing well and where you need to improve.
8. Follow Up on Customers
Customer service doesn’t end once you hang up the phone. Follow-up calls allow you to check whether your issue resolution processes are working or if customers end up facing problems again. It’s also an opportunity to ask for feedback on service quality and overall customer experience.
Following up also helps you provide more personalized service and makes customers feel valued. In the Zendesk report mentioned above, 62% of customers surveyed in 2023 felt that companies could put more effort into providing personalized customer service, so follow up calls can make a real difference.
9. Maintain a QA Team
It’s not always possible for supervisors and managers to monitor every single interaction agents have with customers. Managing quality assurance tasks alongside day-to-day operations can be quite burdensome. This is why having a dedicated quality assurance team can be a tremendous asset to any call center.
A dedicated QA team can help you detect service quality issues that you might have missed otherwise. It can also help you provide more consistent service, detect recurrent issues and adapt your agent training processes accordingly.
10. Integrate Your Call Center Software and CRM
Customer service is only one part of customer relationship management. Integrating the different components of CRM, encouraging communication and data sharing between departments, and working together instead of in silos can help you create more robust improvements in customer experience.
One way to encourage this is by integrating your call center software with your CRM system. This allows you to create more detailed customer profiles, cross check customer histories before calls and provide more personalized customer service.
Why Best Practices Matter
We’ve talked at length about the practices you should follow for your call center. But what do they actually accomplish? Let’s take a look at why best practices matter and how they benefit your organization.
Streamline Processes
Following call center best practices helps you manage your day-to-day business processes in a more systematic way, saving time and resources. More streamlined workflows provide a better working environment for agents and a smoother experience for customers.
For example, automating repetitive tasks through software allows you to save time and direct agent effort towards customer handling. Tools like automatic call allocation and agent collision detection can avoid delays and confusion and make customer interactions more efficient and effective.
Improve Customer Experience
Customer service is the most important part of a call center and a fundamental factor in increasing revenue. In the aforementioned Salesforce report, 94% of customers interviewed said that a company’s treatment of customers influences their purchasing decisions.
Providing a more well-rounded and positive customer experience should always be a first priority. Following best practices allows you to provide your customers with the best possible customer service and helps foster brand loyalty.
Improve Employee Experience
Attrition and lack of job satisfaction are major issues among call center employees. In fact, call centers have some of the highest employee turnover rates among all industries. A better managed call center gives agents an improved working environment, which can reduce attrition. Being able to retain talent reduces costs associated with hiring and training, improving profitability.
Boost Revenue
A properly managed and well-staffed call center generally has a higher revenue stream. Streamlined and systematic workflows use time and resources more effectively, increasing profitability.
Providing better customer experience helps retain customers and build lasting relationships. And in addition to reducing hiring and training costs, retaining experienced agents also tends to strengthen customer relationships, because they’re less likely to make costly mistakes.
Next Steps
Good management practices, efficient tools and talented employees are key to running a successful call center. We’ve covered the best practices in this article. If you want to learn more about call center tools, check out our comparison report to easily evaluate products based on the features that matter to you.
Did you find this article helpful? What are some call center best practices that you’ve used in your call center? Let us know in the comments!
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