It’s important to get your planning right so you can answer incoming calls as quickly as possible. You don’t want agents sitting around waiting for calls. But you also don’t want to have long waiting times. These can easily lead to complaints and higher numbers of unanswered calls. You need insight into your historic inbound traffic and performance to perform custom data analysis for efficient planning. What works best is if you have call data of all numbers and contact centers (in-house and external/off-shore) combined in one centralized and complete overview. That’s a lot easier than gathering and compiling these data from different sources and in different formats.
Customers today expect to be assisted immediately, quickly and adequately. They have little understanding of waiting times or an impersonal approach. Customers want to be served without delay and with a smile when calling customer service. And even better if you exceed their expectations.
Efficient forecasting
Automation used properly
What also helps is to regularly check what kind of questions your customers ask. How many of these really need to be dealt with by an agent? A well-thought-out and executed FAQ section can avoid all those calls with simple requests or questions. Many people prefer to find answers to their questions themselves anyway. This automatically reduces the number of calls for your agents to handle.
Unforeseen peaks
Despite good planning, situations can occur when you have to deal with more incoming calls than your agents and telephone lines can handle. Maybe your marketing campaign is more successful than expected or your service is experiencing an outage. It’s important to have back-up plans at hand. These can help prevent customer service from becoming overloaded and wait times increasing quickly. With dissatisfied customers as a result.
Back-up plans
These back-up plans can be switched on whenever necessary. They lift the weight of the increasing queue from your busy agents. There are several ways to automate customer contact in such situations in a fully customized way. A few examples:
- Give certain customers priority in the queue
- Reroute calls to other call centers where it’s less busy
- Take numbers or make an appointment to be called back when less busy
- Take numbers to send a text message when less busy
- Reserve a spot in the queue so you don’t have to stay on hold
Providing such solutions will significantly decrease your call flow. It will make them more manageable because callers are less likely to hang up and redial. And even though people often aren’t fond of IVR’s, they surely prefer well thought out and effective IVR’s to being kept on hold for a long time with no information.
Smooth customer experience
When combined properly, this will allow for a smooth customer experience that will keep both your customers and your customer service happy. After all, the better your agents’ workload is spread, the better they can help your customers. At ease and with a smile.
