2 Dec 2022
If you want to succeed in 2023
As we near the end of 2022 and hurtle towards 2023, call centre managers need to take a step back, look at their business and analyse what went well and what didn’t.
This will help you to build on this year’s successes and develop a call centre that goes from strength to strength in 2023 and beyond.
On the back of its latest report, “What Contact Centres Are Doing Right Now (2022 Edition),” Call Centre Helper has published a great piece with 5 critical questions call centre managers should ask themselves to help their organisations to flourish.
1. Are you providing your agents with a good work-life balance?
The Covid 19 pandemic has led to a massive shake-up of working practices and greater emphasis on work-life balance. Homeworking and part-time shifts are now the norms.
If your call centre has a high employee churn and attrition rate, then now’s the time to look at what other companies are doing and ask employees more direct work-life balance questions during their exit interviews to see what you can do better.
2. Is voice really the channel of choice?
One of the trends highlighted in Call Centre Helper’s report is that voice is still the channel of choice.
But this does not necessarily mean it’s a preference. It could be because organisations are not providing customers with other routes. A rise in self-service options such as Chatbots and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) indicates a growing demand for alternative channels to voice.
This gives managers an excellent opportunity to look at their call volumes and see if they can work to resolve complex queries more efficiently by providing customers with better self-service options to deal with common, more straightforward queries themselves.
3. Do you need to change your metrics?
Another clear trend identified by the report is that the metrics are changing and that using metrics to measure customer effort is no longer seen as ‘very important.
What matters is the attrition rate.
Contact centre managers should review their current use of metrics and look to make improvements where applicable.
Just because you’ve always measured Average Handling Time (AHT) and First Contact Resolution (FCR), these may not be the right metrics for your call centre today.
4. Are you annoying your customers with feedback requests?
There’s a clear divide between contact centres that ask customers to complete a post-contact survey after each interaction and those that don’t ask.
It’s difficult striking the right balance as you don’t want to miss out on the opportunity to garner feedback, but you don’t want customers to become fed up completing survey after survey.
So what is the right balance?
Call centre managers should look at what they’re asking, why and how. Maybe just sending something once a quarter instead of after each interaction would be better?
5. Are lateness and absence causing you problems?
These are now the No 1 problem faced by call centres managers, with over a third of respondents saying these are now their biggest scheduling problems.
Reasons for this could be employee dissatisfaction and lack of engagement, as well as staff looking for a new job.
You can read Call Centre Helper’s full article and download the What Contact Centres Are Doing Right Now (2022 Edition) here.
And for further tips on how to run a successful contact centre, why not read Chris Merricks blog “What I’ve Learned From Running A Contact Centre.”
If you have any questions or need help with your call centre or CX strategy, get in touch, we're here to help.