10 Tips To Increase Call Center Productivity?
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Are you a call center manager frustrated with the low productivity of your call center?
Are your agents failing to meet the weekly or monthly goals set?
It might be overwhelming for managers to increase the call center efficiency overnight. However, continuity to outdated technology, inadequate agent training, and poor operational management lead to the loss of customers and conversion opportunities.
Longer waiting times, poor management, incompetent agents, and inefficient tools are some of the major reasons for less productivity. These problems frustrate customers and reduce your brand reputation, leading to a loss of customers.
The inefficiency of your contact center can be overcome with some serious strategies. It eventually comes down to having the right set of contact center tools, properly trained and skilled agents, and an easy operational process- making a big impact on the call center's productivity and overall growth.
Highlights:
- Call center productivity is directly related to agent performance and their efficiency at handling customer interactions and resolving customer issues while maintaining high customer satisfaction.
- Identify factors such as using outdated tools, inadequate staff hiring, overworking employees, poor working culture, and unsupportive colleagues that decrease the efficiency of contact centers.
- Some of the best ways to improve contact center productivity are by setting reachable goals, hiring the best staff and training them often, sharing a good knowledge base, optimizing the processes, and automating tasks.
- Using a cloud-based telephony platform like Calilio helps to perform the task efficiently and boosts the overall productivity of the call center.
Importance of Call Center Productivity
Call center productivity shows how effectively the contact center uses its resources, such as employees, time, and technology, to achieve its predefined goals. Satisfied customers, meeting the organizational targets, and how well the agents handle customer interaction denote the call center’s productivity.
For an inbound center, productivity is related to the agent’s performance and how efficiently your agents handle the customer's interactions, resolving their issues and maintaining a positive customer experience. For an outbound center, overall productivity depends upon the quantity of outgoing calls made, calls leading to sales, and other factors.
It is calculated as :
Call Center Productivity = (Total number of calls resolved / Total number of calls handled ) x 100
How to Calculate Call Center Productivity?
There are different metrics available for productivity. Some of the crucial metrics for measuring call center productivity are:
First Call Resolution Rate (FCR)
First-call resolution is a metric that measures the total percentage of calls resolved in the very first call.FCR= (Number of calls resolved on the first contact/ Total number of calls) x 100
100Average Handling Time (AHT)
The average time an agent takes to finish a customer interaction, including talk time and waiting time.AHT= ((Total talk time + Total hold time+ Total post-call work)/ Total Number of calls) x 100100Average Wait Time (AWT)
AWT shows the average time customers spend on hold. High waiting time means unsatisfied and irate customers.AWT= Total wait time for all calls/ Total number of calls handledService Level Agreement (SLA)
SLA calculates the percentage of calls answered within a specified time frame. It indicates the responsiveness of a contact center and ensures that the calls are being answered quickly or not.SLA= (Number of calls answered within a specified time / Total number of calls) x 100Call Abandonment Rate
The total percentage of calls that were abandoned by the callers before they were answered by the agent. High call abandonment rates refer to issues with staffing or call routing.Abandonment rate = (Number of Abandoned calls/ Total number of calls) x 100 100Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
Customer satisfaction score (CSAT) measures how satisfied customers are with the call experience, usually through surveys. A high CSAT score indicates positive service.CSAT = (Number of satisfied customers / Total number of survey responses) x 100100
Reasons for Low Call Center Productivity
If you want to increase your contact center’s productivity, you need to understand all those factors negatively affecting the overall efficiency. To improve productivity consistently, you need to pay attention to these factors.
- Outdated Technology
- Incompetent Agents
- Inadequate Staffs
- Limited Technology Access
- Inadequate Training
- Low engagement and employee morale
- Excessive employee burnout
- Poor management and leadership
- Unsupportive working environment
How to Boost Call Center Productivity? [10 Best Tips]
1. Set Realistic Goals
Establish achievable and realistic goals to give agents a clear vision for their future work. When they know what are the expectations they have to meet, they’re likely to be goal-oriented and stay motivated.
Managers and supervisors should often communicate to build, implement, and evaluate these goals. Using call center productivity metrics like first-call resolutions, average handling time (AHT), and others, they should provide agents with improvising performance feedback frequently to keep them directed and focused.
3. Empower Your Agents
Empowered agents are more productive and more efficient in their work. Don't try to micromanage and decide everything for your agent. It may seem like a controlling environment. Give your team decision-making power to exchange deals, offer a new service plan, and provide a customized solution whenever required without complicated processes. This offers job satisfaction along with better productivity.
4. Monitor Agent Performance
Use different tools to monitor and evaluate the agent’s performance. You can monitor the agents using call monitoring tools and AI-powered call reports for easy and detailed analysis. Get the insights from the interactions and know where your team needs improvement along with their plus points.
Managers and supervisors should provide improvising feedback to agents. When an agent has a low-level performance, instead of pinpointing their weakness, you should teach them how to overcome those as a supervisor.
5. Use the Right Technology
Tools with a higher resolution time improve analysis and help reduce the repetition of work through automation. When implementing new solutions, you must ensure they are best for your call center requirements. Ensure the features such as:
- Real-time Call Monitoring tools
For quality assurance, it allows supervisors to monitor the agent's performance and analyze it as they are happening and provide real-time feedback and assistance through different ways such as call whispering or call barging. - Automatic Call Distribution (ACD)
Automatically distribute incoming calls among the available agents to optimize the agent’s workload. - Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
Automates the call routing to the right agent based on the customer input, reducing the customer wait time for faster resolutions and improving productivity. - Call Queues
A call center with very high call volumes compulsorily needs a call queue feature to manage these overwhelming numbers of calls. It helps organize incoming calls and informs callers of their estimated wait time and position. Call queues ensure no call goes unanswered, even during peak hours, without overloading your agents. - Predictive Dialing
Predictive dialing enables agents to reach more customers in a shorter time, reducing agent idle time, engaging in more conversations, and improving conversion rates. It is especially helpful to outbound call centers’ as it increases their talk times and greatly boosts efficiency. - Advanced Reporting
Managers can track the performance of agents and the overall capacity using advanced reporting features like call analytics. Real-time dashboards provide comprehensive insights into the overall call center’s activities. and what needs to be improved to ensure better performance of the call center.
6. Knowledge Bases
A centralized database accessible to agents at all times reduces the agent’s time spent researching on the internet. This knowledge base may include customer FAQs, their answers, and call scripts.
Providing well-structured information, including FAQs, troubleshooting guides, and product details, helps agents when they need to resolve customer issues quickly.
7. Optimize Current Processes
Optimizing the usual processes reduces the operational time for agents, leading to lower costs and increasing customer satisfaction. Conduct deep research of all the major current processes and technology used, look for their pros and cons, and create an improvement roadmap with guided workflow.
Minimizing the tasks to be performed by the agents during the calls reduces the waiting time, improving contact center productivity. Use the AI tools, equip the contact center with the latest technology and automate the processes to minimize the manual task.
8. Speed
Quick customer satisfaction increases the overall efficiency of the customer support center. Every caller who reaches out to customer support wants their issues to be resolved instantly.
For this, agents should be skilled, well-trained, and equipped with the convenient tools to solve possibly every customer's problems effectively during the first call.
Customers are easily satisfied when their problems are solved rapidly.
9. Creating a Positive Work Environment
A supportive and motivating work environment makes agents feel valued, cared for, and appreciated. Recognize and reward the agents for their achievement while encouraging them with poor performance. Offering professional growth and building a collaborative workplace reduces stress, and providing constructive feedback motivates people to do well in their work.
10. Self-service Options
Automating the self-service options to customer take the workload off the agents. This way, agents can focus on resolving more complex issues. As for the customer, they can get answers quickly for their basic concerns, while for more serious inquiries, the call gets routed to the related agents.
Self-service options like AI chatbots handle simple inquiries, provide basic information, and guide them to simple troubleshooting steps. Another self-service option is a well-structured FAQ section on the company’s website addressing general inquiries, reducing the calls for basic questions.
Conclusion
Improving productivity is a continuous process of fine-tuning your operations processes in the contact center. Equipping agents with the best call center software, setting realistic, clear goals, and focusing on agent improvement enhances overall efficiency. By creating a collaborative and positive working environment, you can motivate your agents to perform their best.
Calilio, a cloud telephony system, offers easy-to-use call center solutions to maximize your performance and increase efficiency daily. Integrated with the most important call center tools, features like call queues, call routing, and call monitoring boost agents’ productivity and overall operational efficiency. Get Started!!!
Frequently Asked Questions
How to improve call center performance?
You can enhance your call center's overall performance by defining achievable goals, optimizing processes, improving agents' efficiency, creating positive work environments, using the right technology, and using automated tools to reduce manual tasks.
Why is call center work so exhausting?
Call center work is a stressful job as agents need to deal with angry customers daily. Plus, the repetitive task in a stressful environment of customer interaction results in agent burnout, resulting in low productivity in a call center.
What is the formula for call center productivity?
Call center productivity can be measured using:
Call center productivity = (Total number of resolved calls / Total number of handled calls) x 100
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