Customer service has changed. With the advent of new technologies, call centers must deliver higher standards.

Traditional call centers haven't lost any of their original appeal, even though Google is imposing itself as an expert in everything. Human nature, however, is not that easily tricked. While there's nothing wrong with chatbots and direct messaging, some customers will still rather talk to a living, breathing customer support representative.

Even eCommerce stores offer this option to their customers! It can help with not only customer interactions, but also with straightforward eCommerce fulfillment, as long as you have the right tools. 

Let's take a look at how you can make your contact center even more immaculate.

Organizing Call Center Processes

Customer support representatives must go beyond answering calls without any idea of what to do next. The finest of call centers follow a set of well-established processes.

To get an idea of the processes to create, ask yourself the following:

  • What should customer representatives say when they pick up the call?
  • What should customer representatives do when they don't know the answer to the question?
  • How will customer representatives track the inquiries?
  • What should customer representatives do when the call is over?

You can follow up with additional steps as you see fit, focusing on keeping track of inquiries.  

Train Your Customer Support Representatives

Sadly, many businesses customarily neglect their frontline employees. It's also no secret that these people often lack the latest tech.

Don't let that happen to your employees!

First of all, make sure to train your customer representatives. No matter how long it takes, you should be patient.  

Customer support can be difficult, as there's no saying what kinds of issues customers may run into, so you must ensure that your frontline employees know exactly how to assist. One good way to prepare for the unexpected is to organize practice sessions where customer representatives can role-play different situations.

Also, make sure to assign a mentor to each new hire. In this way, every employee will know where to go for answers if something unexpected comes up.

Set Up Guidelines for Unexpected Situations

Setting up guidelines for unexpected situations will help customer representatives deal with unforeseen situations.

The usual practice is to redirect the call to employees specializing in the issue.

Train Your Support Representatives to Personalize Inquiries

Personalization is always recommended. The practice lets customers know that they matter and are not just another number in a long line of queries.

To excel at this, representatives need to possess certain soft skills, so pick the right people for the role!

Of course, different people have different personalities so not everyone will be able to excel in this field. However, it goes without saying that personality traits should be assessed during the interview. Don't hire people who aren't suitable for the role.

Create a Dedicated Knowledgebase

Call centers are often overloaded with generic questions from new customers. Creating a FAQ manual and posting it on your website is one good way to address the issue.

Since call centers often receive too many calls issues that don't need professional assistance should be mainstreamed.

Make Use of Contact Center Automation

Seamless automations for content centers holds some real benefits. It can be used for all steps of the process, as follows:

  • Automating processes
  • Empowering employees
  • Connecting with customers
  • Driving continual improvement

Make sure to choose automation software that delivers unified RPA and conversational AI capabilities for the best results. This will help you to optimize processes and streamline procedures fast and efficiently.

Deploy New Tech

In addition to the above mentioned, you should also make use of additional new tech solutions. Some ideas include VoIP protocols, interactive voice response (IVR) systems, and automatic call distributor (ACD) systems.

VoIP protocols: Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is a method for the delivery of voice communications and multimedia sessions over Internet Protocol (IP) networks, such as the Internet.

IVR systems: Interactive voice response (IVR) is a technology that allows humans to interact with a computer-operated phone system through the use of voice and DTMF tones input via a keypad. In telecommunications, IVR allows customers to interact with a company's host system via a telephone keypad or by speech recognition, after which services can be inquired about through the IVR dialogue.

ACD systems: An automated call distribution (ACD) system is a telephony device that answers and distributes incoming calls to a specific group of terminals or agents within an organization. ACDs often use a voice menu to direct callers based on the customer's selection.

If your customer support team is working remotely, it is crucial to keep the employees connected. Use any apps and tools you deem fit to establish this goal.

Set Up Reliable Record-Keeping System

Finally, make sure to include a reliable record-keeping system in your procedures. Your customer representative team should be consistent in reporting and, also, you should use the records for recurring situations and new procedures.

It is also a good idea to keep track of all calls so that repeat callers don't have to explain everything from scratch every time they call (which happens way too often and annoys both the customers and frontline employees).

Nowadays, it is common practice to record calls and include all points of interest in a dedicated database. Each and every member of your team should have access to it, and make sure the process isn't overly complicated.

Key Takeaways

As you can see, running a contact center is not an easy job by any means. However, if you manage to establish good procedures and train your personnel, things will start looking up.

Make use of automation & record-keeping, and record all calls for further reference.

All of these procedures will be streamlined in time, so don't worry too much if things are sloppy in the beginning.

The most important thing is to be consistent and patient. The rest will naturally come.