No one starts their day with the thought of spending 30 minutes to an hour on the phone, waiting to reach a support agent who can resolve their issues. However, the customer might not have such a haunting experience when the business they are reaching out to uses contact center solutions. The line “let me put you on hold,” always leaves a negative impression on customers, who’re likely to feel helpless and undervalued on hearing this clichéd phrase. 

This is especially true now when the world is hit by a pandemic, restricting us physically while also adding a mental strain. A Washington Post article reported that companies across the globe are struggling to accommodate calls while maintaining the health and safety of their employees. Some of them have resorted to establishing landing pages for frequently encountered issues, as well as policy revisions to avoid mundane conversations. 

But are the firms really at fault or is the way we communicate just changing? 

Perhaps it has something to do with today’s crisis? Let’s take a closer look at these pain points and figure out how to improve call center metrics through big data and analytics. 

We’ll also explore a couple of solutions that would complement your newly learnt improvement strategies. 

1. Measure your service level

Service level refers to the number of answered calls within an earmarked duration. In order to improve performance, you have to accurately calculate this metric for your organisation. 

According to experts in the industry, 80% of calls answered within 20 seconds should be the standard to follow for all contact centers. 

Here’s how it works: Let’s say your contact center receives an overall volume of 100 calls per day. The 80% ceiling would require 80 calls to be attended to in 20 seconds. 

Let’s assume your agents managed to tackle 65 of those calls within the time limit.  The service level can then be found by dividing calls answered by the calls that were required to be answered and taking the percentage out of that. 

i.e., 65/80 * 100 = 81.25% service level

This KPI (key performance indicator) is quite important for agents and managers alike. 

You could either measure it daily or weekly. Besides its role as a performance metric for agent evaluation, upper management can also keep track of managers’ work and the progress of different teams within the organisation. 

Service level percentage is a good way to implement improvement strategies at the workplace. However, this won’t be enough on its own. You also need to establish a limited time frame to effectively compute service level, depending on your specific needs. 

2. Enlist a cloud-hosted phone system

If you’re wondering how to actually bring up the performance of your business, you should definitely consider acquiring the latest cloud technology. You’ve probably encountered quite a few confusing VoIP terms while browsing for tools, but a powerful innovation you can definitely rely on is the cloud-hosted phone system. 

Designed to be versatile and tailored to your business demands, a cloud-hosted phone system enables you to run virtual contact centers anywhere via the Internet. It drastically cuts costs and offers increased flexibility in your communication channels. 

Moreover, the cloud can provide you with an appealing virtual number, which you can use to promote your business and give customers an easy (and free) way to stay in touch with you at all times.

Apart from improving the service level of contact centers, hosted cloud phones also guarantee call continuity with minimal downtime. You can even document queries within the call history and enable alerts and voicemails so that you never miss a caller. These solutions also come with an online portal that acts as a gateway to personalise your phone system.

Here are a few call center features to consider for enriching your business communications. The cloud is packed with benefits that can help you implement call center improvement strategies. 

3. Allot resources for call center improvement strategies

Sure, you might already have ideas on how to improve your kiosk’s performance, but how can these ideas come to fruition if you’re not willing to spend time or money on them? 

Time is easy. You just have to allot time for evaluating your organisation’s overall performance and devote daily efforts to improve call metrics. It all boils down to how you utilise the hours of each workday, but we’re hoping you use them well enough to appraise and enhance your service level. 

As for finances, you need to set aside some budget for courses and training that can empower your team to develop the qualities necessary in successful support agents. Additionally, you can enlist a outbound call center software that can help boost your service level. 

Investing in the latter isn’t very expensive. There are basic pricing packages that begin with £4.99 per user per month, which isn’t a hefty price if you want your strategies to bear fruit. 

If your contact center is bigger and more complex, you can also subscribe to upgraded packages with more benefits that can address your particular requirements. 

4. Track your activity and results

Call centers operate with a popular phrase “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” To fully improve your services, you need to keep an eye on KPIs for all the agents and their projects. 

Furthermore, you need to use these metrics thoroughly and regularly—be it every hour, week or month—to maintain top-notch performance levels, give customers the best experience, and maintain meaningful relationships with them. 

Once you’ve grasped how to improve service levels in your center, it’s time to turn towards other metrics such as efficiency indicators, call abandonment rates, quality indicators, media ROI determinants, and sales and customer service indicators. 

Although you may have robust strategies for your support services in place already, don’t forget to read the reports and analyse the data you’re presented with. This could make or break your operations and can purposefully indicate if you’re soaring up or heading downwards. 

Conclusion

Monitoring your performance on various aspects will solidify your plans for improving call center metrics. However, don’t forget to enlist time, effort, and technology on your side as well. 

It’s important to secure contact center services in order to become more efficient and ultimately, give your patrons the best customer service that they deserve. 

When customers drop a call while waiting to get connected to an agent, that call is considered as an abandoned call. Whatever may be the reason, abandoned calls leave a negative impact.

A higher rate of abandoned calls means a greater number of dissatisfied customers.

The rate of abandoned calls is an important performance indicator, and it also includes answered but abandoned calls during outbound campaigns. You should note that this assessment does not include unattended calls.

According to this report, call abandon rates between 5% and 8% are normal. Depending on the industry and time of the day, these rates can go as high as 20%.

Having said that, let us understand more about abandoned calls.

What is the rate of abandoned calls? 

The abandonment rate of calls is defined as the percentage of calls that were disconnected before getting connected to an agent when compared to the total number of incoming calls. This ratio is calculated by dividing the number of abandoned calls by the total number of calls.

How is the call abandonment rate measured accurately?

A few ways to accurately measure the rate of abandoned calls are:

• Ensure that you don’t include calls that last less than five seconds. They may be misdialled.
• Track calls as they enter the IVR (interactive voice response) system rather than counting calls in queues of agents.
• Make sure to not double count calls that have been transferred for assistance from one department to another. This will automatically mislead and increase your abandonment rate.
• Use your CRM software to accurately track calls and callers. 

Having said that, here are a few tricks to reduce call abandonment rates in your call center.

1.Communicate estimated call wait time

Communication strengthens customer relationships. It is important to let your customers know the estimated wait-time for a call. This information will help them make an informed decision about waiting to get connected to an agent or to call back later.

An IVR system can help set an estimated waiting time and create announcements for inbound calls. These are played automatically for customers after the system calculates the average waiting time.

Though a few customers decide to disconnect the call after listening to the announcement, others may choose to stay on call.

2. Offer virtual queueing and call-backs

Customer satisfaction scores can be improved by offering an option to receive a call back or self navigate to the information they need.

Incorporating IVR systems and Automatic Call Distributor (ACD) can aid first-call-resolution. They enable customers to reach the right place for the information, thereby reducing the number of repeated calls.

Furthermore, the call-back option helps customers gain control of their time. They are assured of receiving a response from the company soon.

These features help decrease average hold time, increase the bandwidth to attend more calls, and offer the best call center services possible.

3. Focus on Agent Training

It is important to invest time and funds on stepping up your agents’ skills. This will boost their confidence to attend different types of calls swiftly.  Call centers that offer training and classes for their agents can increase their productivity with best practices along with enhancing customer experiences.

Again, offering information about the standards of etiquette will contribute towards reducing call abandonment rates.

4. Reduce average handling time

Reduction in the average handling time will keep the call abandonment rate in-check. You should track the average time spent by agents on calls. The faster agents deal with customer calls, the lesser the waiting time and chances of call abandonment.

However, it is equally important to pay attention to the quality of customer service delivered. You cannot afford to compromise on your customer service quality even if you are in a hurry to move through the queue to the next waiting customer.

5. Extend your ring time

We are all used to waiting through multiple rings before being attended on calls. Use this to reduce your call abandonment rates.

Instead of promptly offering an automated response that asks your customers to keep waiting, let them go through several rings before they enter the call queue. This will reduce their perception of time spent waiting to get connected and reduce the level of annoyance to a certain extent.

6. Provide self-service options

Providing options for self-service can help reduce call abandonment rates to a great degree. A few effective ways of how this can be done are:

• Offer voice interactions through IVR that prompt customers to select appropriate options from a predefined menu using their keypad.
• Send interactions through emails that include links to forms. These will be filled by the customers with appropriate information.
• Send SMS/text messages that ask customers for information and help schedule appointments.

7. Plan appropriate schedules to meet demands

Stakeholders should keep a hold on unpredicted demands. They should be able to identify patterns, in order to have enough agents to deal with a sudden spike in calls. This can be done by either adding headcount or modifying employee schedule.

If you are not able to add headcount, try to track calls and identify patterns of a surge. Maybe it is due to seasonal demand or after a rather attractive marketing campaign. This information will help you effectively manage your workforce.

You may schedule your representatives or forecast shift coverage based on requirements. Sharing resources within teams or expanding your team are a few other ways to meet a higher call flow.

Wrap Up

A low call abandonment rate means reaching out to a greater number of customers. This will help you showcase your call center as a well-staffed and organised kiosk with a focus on offering convenient and seamless customer experiences.

Hopefully, the above-mentioned points will provide a peek into several ways to control your call abandonment rates and boost customer satisfaction.

To find out how you can use intelligent technology to further reduce call abandonment rates, contact our sales team at 1888-859-0450 or drop an email at [email protected].