Should your business collaborate with an inbound call centre, the initial impression your customer forms about your business commonly hinges on their interaction with the call centre. That’s why the customer service experience provided by your call centre can change how customers think about your business. When call centre quality is treated as a top priority, it becomes a core competitive advantage. With over 55 years of industry experience, we have put together some tips that will help you find a call centre that raises the bar for your organization.
The call centre impact on inbound lead generation
Your call centre is often responsible for transforming calls into conversions. A quality call centre can convert inquiries into conversions by providing personalized service that builds trust. A high-quality call centre will ensure:
- Increased revenue and sales: Delighted customers tend to spend more and stay loyal, resulting in higher revenue and sales. Enable your call centre to take payments, make bookings, or make reservations on behalf of your company.
- Reduced churn and costs: High-quality service reduces customer churn and partnering with a call centre costs less than hiring full-time employees.
- Enhanced brand affinity: Positive call centre experiences solidify your brand promise, boosting your reputation as a service-oriented company, while poor customer experiences or difficulty reaching your company representatives can tarnish it.
Characteristics of a high-quality inbound call centre
Inbound call centres that positively influence lead generation, sales, and customer service often share the following traits:
- Friendly and knowledgeable agents: Well-trained agents who deeply understand your products, services, systems, and policies are essential. But picture this: they're not just technically savvy; they're also champions of empathy, active listeners, and problem-solving superheroes.
- Minimal wait times: Customers expect swift responses. Exceptional call centres meticulously manage schedules to cut down on hold times. They even offer callback options that ensure you're not left waiting. Their target? Answering your call in under 30 seconds!
- Skilled triage and dispatch: Receive urgent calls in real-time and let non-urgent callers leave a message to be returned tomorrow. High-quality inbound call centres ensure they have the perfect triage process in place for your script. Your call centre can also dispatch employees on-call based on the triaging in your script.
- Rigorous quality monitoring: Ever wondered how the best call centres maintain stellar service? They go undercover (not quite like James Bond) recording calls and evaluating interactions based on courtesy, issue resolution, compliance, and efficiency. They coach their agents based on these evaluations, ensuring every conversation is consistently outstanding.
How great call centres benchmark performance
To truly evaluate inbound call centre quality, companies must actively monitor and benchmark key performance indicators (KPIs). These metrics reveal customer perceptions, operational efficiency, and agent effectiveness.
- Average time to Answer: Track the queue wait time, comparing it against industry standards for benchmarking.
- Abandonment Rate: Monitor the percentage of callers hanging up before connecting to an agent. Keep it under 7%.
- Average Handle Time: Assess the duration spent per call, considering call type and complexity.
- Service Levels: Measure the percentage of calls answered within a set timeframe. Most target 75% within 30-35 seconds. Service level is calculated on a monthly average. In some cases, calls will be answered in under 5 seconds, in other cases it may take as many as 40 seconds for a call to be answered. This is when the callback feature can really shine!
The path to continuous improvement
For call centres to reach peak performance, it's a journey of perpetual improvement—a cycle of monitoring, analyzing feedback, and refining processes. Continuous improvement is one of five core values at Telelink. A dedication to continuous improvement allows Telelink to be a high-quality inbound call centre. Here are a few of the things we track to ensure we’re constantly improving:
- Set clear quality standards. Establish precise targets for KPIs like average time to answer or. Clear goals give teams something to rally behind and ensure everyone is rowing in the same direction.
- Hire for soft skills and culture fit. Find agents with innate warmth, problem-solving abilities, and communication skills aligned with your brand.
- Institute ongoing training and coaching. Blend classroom, online, and hands-on training. Feedback from call monitoring is gold.
- Standardize processes and best practices. Document processes for common scenarios, while allowing flexibility for customer-centric exceptions. This is a huge part of being ISO 9001 certified.
- Invest in enabling supportive technology. Equip agents with tools like cloud call centre software, IVR, knowledge bases, and call recording.
- Motivate and foster team spirit using recognition and rewards when performance is up to the mark.
- Continuously monitor and improve. Listen to calls, analyze metrics, survey customers and refresh processes to raise the bar.
- Keep customer experience at the centre. View decisions through the lens of how they impact customer satisfaction and brand perception.
A quality call centre can help your business become more competitive by improving the experience that is delivered to your customers. Implementing the above strategies will not only ensure that your customers have a great experience but will also help you get the most out of your money.