8 mins read
“The first step in exceeding your customer’s expectations is to know those expectations.” –Roy H. Williams, Author and founder of the Wizard Academy Institute.
As per a Walker study, customer experience will overtake product and price as the key differentiator at the end of 2020.
Businesses, even after understanding the value of customer expectations, often fail to build on them. Making that extra effort to know your audience better can make all the difference to sales, revenues, profitability, and more importantly, consumer loyalty.
However, this is easier said than done, as one has to build buyers’ personas, follow them closely, gather feedback, and stay connected. Even if you stay ahead on all these fronts, ensuring that these insights reach all your customer handling agents is a challenge.
Thankfully, modern call centre solutions solve this problem. With the right kind of features, agents are to be able to deliver the highest levels of customer satisfaction.
One such tool is calling whispering. It is a powerful cloud telephony feature that aids agents in delivering satisfactory support, improves team performance and enhances business reputation.
But before you start looking for a solution that offers this feature, it is important to dive deep and understand the value it can add to your business.
So, let’s take a closer look.
What is Call Whispering?
Essentially, call whispering is a feature that lets your managers monitor call center agents as they converse with callers. With this tool, managers are able to do two things––firstly, track the performance of experienced agents; and secondly, they can coach and assist new recruits.
The best part? Only the agents hear the whisper and the callers never come to know anything about it.
Apart from supporting agents while handling customers, the whisper feature can also be used to brief agents before they get into support calls. This will equip them with important customer information and help them stay a step ahead.
For callers, this means quick query resolution and higher satisfaction without the hassles of repetitive questions and the friction of the process.
How does Call Whispering Work along with other Call Centre Features?
According to a study by Harvard Business Review, employee performance greatly depends on their satisfaction levels. Satisfied people showed 16% better performance as compared to those who are dissatisfied. Further, they also demonstrated an impressive 32% increase in commitment levels and were 125% less likely to experience burnout.
When it comes to increasing agent satisfaction, everything boils down to excellent training. Call whispering serves as a reliable tool that increases their confidence and job satisfaction levels, and the results reflect in their performance. Here are some ways you can use this feature as an element of customer support best practices, hence boosting customer experience and overall satisfaction.
- Call Monitoring: You can use it along with call whispering. Listen in on calls and understand how individual agents are handling customer queries. Jump in and whisper advice if the agent appears in need of assistance or if the call does not seem to be going right.
- Call Barging: It helps managers or experienced executives to take over during a support conversation if the query is too complex or the caller is too upset. This feature helps businesses enhance their first call resolution and elevates customer satisfaction levels.
- Call Recording: Managers can access call recordings where they used call whisper to show agents how to best leverage the feature. And this knowledge can be imparted to, both, new and experienced agents. Real-life examples serve as excellent tools to help people understand how they can handle challenging situations.
How does Call Whispering Benefit Businesses?
Maintaining a successful team of call center agents is a massive challenge, especially in a competitive landscape. Even one below-average support call can lead to the loss of a customer forever.
You will have to think beyond just giving your agents a script or telling them how to handle the impatient callers. The need of the hour is high-quality training that makes them adept at customer service or sales techniques.
Call whispering offers extensive benefits in this context, some of which are mentioned below:
- Helps train new recruits who are still learning about the brand’s tone of voice, customer expectations, and common or complex queries
- Enables coaching of the existing team members who may be struggling to deliver as per the company’s standards
- Empowers managers with an effective tool that enhances the team’s overall communication skills
- Gives managers the opportunity to barge in and help agents handle challenging clients or solve complex problems without wasting time
- Supports the initiative of creating a valuable team that has the potential to convert new leads and retain existing clients
Which Businesses can Benefit from the Call Whispering Feature?
Call whispering is an advanced feature that can serve immense benefits to any organisation which has a customer-facing call center to handle sales or support functions. Also, it makes for a wise investment for businesses that run multiple campaigns simultaneously.
E-commerce marketplaces, educational establishments, healthcare organisations, and helpdesk and support centers are also good candidates for a call center solution empowered with this feature.
Why should a Business Embrace Call Whispering right now?
Sales and customer support calls can be far more challenging than you think as customers are conscious now more than ever. Every call is different, and the way your agents handle them has a far-reaching impact on the reputation of your business.
Customer satisfaction depends on the words, tone, and interactions of call center agents. So, it makes sense to go the extra mile with their training and preparation for customer handling.
Call whispering is a win-win-win feature for everyone—businesses, agents, and callers. For businesses, it cuts down the sales cycles, increases close rates, and drives conversions and retention.
Moreover, agents become more confident with better training and assurance that they will indeed get help when they need it. Their performance improves, and they tend to be more loyal and committed to their role. re perhaps the biggest winners, though, because they get an incredible experience with every call.
A Final Word
Now that you understand how valuable call whispering can be, the next step would be to find a call center solution that offers this feature.
Acefone is a reliable cloud call center service provider you can trust to take your business to new heights. Our holistic solutions will empower your business with features like call whispering and much more.
Looking to empower your business, agents, and customers with call whispering?
