Call centers are responsible for taking care of every incoming and outgoing customer call and this only means things can get hectic quickly if you do not have the right resources to manage. If you have a growing business and are ready to scale, you need to pay attention to these tips on scalability and flexibility.
In the world of customer service, call centers play an important role irrespective of the size of the business. Inbound call center are the platform where customers have a first stage of interaction with a company, which is important for what comes next. So the first impression has to be always good for every customer.
One of the best ways to get this job done is by having qualified agents or also known as call center representatives and innovative advanced technologies in your toolkit. You don’t need endless resources at your disposal to be a successful call center, but just the right and scalable balance.
What Does Scaling Your Call Center Mean?
Scaling your call center is nothing but investing the appropriate amount of time and resources to improve your call center for the benefit of your customers as well as your call agents. Oracle call center solution helps you make sure that your call center representatives have the bandwidth to take care of all their workloads without you having to over-hire in times of high demand. You can follow these practical tips to scale your call center.
Tips to Scale Your Call Center
1. Hire More Agents
It is not that you need to hire more and more call center agents when you grow as a business but instead, you need to start with the right number of representatives so it will not be an issue when you scale. You need an efficient interviewing and onboarding process to hire and train new employees for a scalable team. The mistake every company does is that they try to give the new hires as much information about the work as possible but this can make the new trainees overwhelmed and stressed. So to avoid this you can create a knowledge base online by creating a portal where your team can access all the information of customers 24/7 quickly. This tool allows new agents to have all the knowledge at their fingertips and find any information about customers they need at their own convenience.
Just as customer information, knowing the goals and aims of the company is important for both new and existing agents to perform their roles properly. Setting a clear and measurable goal for each department and for each member of your team allows you to measure the success of your organization. You should also make sure to emphasize the importance of these goals to your newly hired employees so that they will have an understanding of how work is done and what will be the outcome of it. These goals provide you visibility into the progress of your team and allow you to improve the unique set of skills each of your employees has which serves as an indicator that you need to hire more or not.
2. Track Key Metrics
If you want to improve your customer satisfaction and give them the best user experience possible then tracking your key metrics is an important factor. These metrics are also known as key performance indicators (KPIs) which are vital for meeting the needs and expectations of your customers and agents.
KPIs that you should track:
- Average waiting time – This waiting time of your customers is one of the important metrics. You need to set up a time and see whether your agents are able to attend the call within the specific time, if not it means you need to hire more staff to handle the incoming calls within the time.
- First call resolution rate – It means that your customer queries are resolved in their first call and do not need to call back multiple times.
- Customer satisfaction score (CSAT) – You should send your customers a survey after they have received your service to know how well their interaction with your call center was. These scores allow you to know the areas of improvement.
- Cost per call (CPC) – This key factor helps you test out the knowledge and skill of your employees. A call center representative should have the ability to know who to transfer the call to based on a customer’s needs.
- High call demands – There is some peak hour of traffic which is based on the time zone of your call center or the product or service you provide. You should make sure there are enough agents to manage these peak times.
3. Automate Tasks
You can help your agents to have impactful interaction with your customers with the help right technologies and it is impossible for every single employee of yours to have all the information they necessarily need in front of them to effectively resolve a customer query. But this is where technology comes into play and some essential call center features you should have in your call center are:
- Pop-up – This technology brings specific customer information as a pop-up notification to the screen of your call agent when they answer a call from a customer. Computer telephony integration (CTI) is what makes this possible.
- The job engine – You need to make sure that your call center agent has the right information to help your customer resolve their issues using product synchronization, other systems, databases, web services, and more. You will have to create users, ticket items, and other specific information related to customers to ensure that your agents and customers do not struggle at any point in their interaction.
Call centers need to be equipped with the right information about the customers to survive in this fast-changing environment. It can be challenging to equip agents with this flow of information and make it accessible to them within seconds but by integrating jobs engine technology and the above-mentioned pop-up notification, you can overcome this challenge and effectively scale your business.
4. Tools
Technology is very important in the field of the call center industry and needs to work side by side to ensure that businesses work properly. You need to make sure that your agents can utilize integrated technology from the staring of a call to the end. These tools help a representative to efficiently attend a call by eliminating tasks like opening, closing, and switching to multiple windows many times, logging in and out of different systems, and transferring information back and forth manually. Instead, all the information agents need will be in one central location accessible to them at any time. These tools are powered by CTI technology, they are:
- Call recording – This tool should be integrated with any call center so the agents can track their calls and see if they have missed any important information during a call.
- Voicemail – This helps your agents quickly access and catch up the missed messages from customers when they received them during non-working hours.
- Call metrics – You need to constantly keep track of your KPIs
- External communication – this helps your agents to connect and engage with your customers from one single platform with the help of live chat and SMS-like tools
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What is the strategy of Oracle?
Oracle application strategy is based on three principles, they are – complete, open, and integrated.
2. Why do companies use Oracle?
Using Oracle-based software integration allows the business to unify multiple channels of communication into one single platform and reduces operational costs as well which will result in improved customer satisfaction and agent productivity.
3. What is Oracle Solutions?
The Oracle call center solution offers to help meet the requirements of the production system and test and tune the overall performance of your business. Not only that but also you can ensure that your agents meet the customer’s requirements in the present and in the future.
Achieving Scalability and Flexibility With Oracle Call Center Integration
A growing business needs to achieve scalability and flexibility which can be done with the help of Oracle call center integration. You can also use cloud-based integration platforms like Oracle integration cloud service, you can ensure the productivity of your call agent is utilized fully and provide exceptional customer support. By using the tools and technologies mentioned above you can scale your business and make more improvements as well.
