How to improve call centre customer service

A call centre is a central network within an organisation involving sales, customer service agents and managers who handle incoming and outgoing communication from prospective and existing customers. Many call centres focus on striving to achieve maximum customer satisfaction and supporting their every need. Most callers often disconnect when they can’t speak to a human rather than an auto-receptionist. This is why today many call centres are powered by VoIP phone systems that can handle large volumes of calls.

Whether you are a call centre manager or business owner, you will understand the importance of how fundamentally important your call centre is. In today’s digital age, the best business phone system often means leveraging VoIP phone services.

Zadarma’s PBX phone system is a popular call centre solution. The multiple features provided offer call centres with the ability to manage and optimise call flow, whilst maintaining a high level of customer service. These smart new telephony features are proving popular for customer call centre teams. Let’s observe how to improve your call centre’s customer service capability through a PBX VoIP phone solution.

Tactics to improve customer experience in call centres

Set up incoming call rules

If your call centre is using a VoIP phone system, then it is important you set up rules so that incoming calls are freely directed to the next available agent. This will ensure your business will never miss a customer call. If all agents are busy, they can be directed to a group inbox to leave a message. You can even mobilise extra customer call team members and direct incoming calls to employees working remotely or in different locations. Incoming call rule setting ensures your call centre is efficient with an optimum call handling process in place.

Improve pick up rates

Customers don’t want to wait. You stand the risk of losing that sale even before you have spoken with them. By using a VoIP PBX phone system within your call centre, you can make sure customer calls are answered within a few seconds. You can use automatic routing rules so all agents get equal opportunities to answer calls.

Analyse, monitor and optimise calls

VoIP phone systems have many useful features that allow call centre agents to talk to managers or supervisors to quickly solve customer problems. Zadarma has recently introduced “Call Barging” and “Whispering Modes” as part of their suite of features offered within Zadarma’s. They are allowing call handling centres and departments to maintain a high level of customer service even during peak call times. Features like whispering modes and call barging are often valuable to ensure that customers’ needs are satisfied and their demands are being attended to as quickly and effectively as possible.

Understand your customer

High customer satisfaction scores often occur when the customer feels like they have received a personalised level of customer service. To ensure a positive customer experience, it’s helpful for call centre agents to know as much about customers as possible. There are various VoIP calling tools that allow you to understand your customer better.

Call tracking allows you to track phone calls, which unlocks insights into interactions customers have with your business. This helps you understand the caller’s intent to buy. The data captured and calls recorded lets your call centre team analyse what your customers have discussed during the call. Zadarma offers a simple call tracking service that allows you to evaluate the effectiveness of different advertising channels. It analyses the number of incoming calls (phone numbers are assigned to the advertising channels) and shows additional call data and client sessions on your website. Call tracking will assist in targeting and optimising your marketing spend, improving your Return On Investment, which often provides future advertising savings.

Call forwarding can be used when a call is barged and the solution from this is that the call needs to be forwarded on to another department. Call forwarding can also be used when an agent is busy or out.

Call recordings, speech analytics and speech recognition are features that can be used to investigate conversations. Call recordings allow you to play back calls to better understand your customer and any legacy conversations. Speech analytics look for call scenarios where supervisors may have had to barge a call. They assist with providing call data analysis and speech data that can unlock significant insights into understanding why a call escalated.

Optimise your cost savings

Most call centre business owners know that you can make huge cost savings through an integrated VoIP phone solution. Most cloud VoIP phone services will be cheaper than an existing traditional hardwire phone solution. But how does that improve customer service? By decreasing the costs of phone calls, you can spend your savings on improving your call centre’s communication processes. This can often mean implementing innovative ideas to improve customer service, to give you that competitive edge and point of difference over your competitors.

CRM integration with training

VoIP systems also integrate well with CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems.

CRM integration ensures you can keep your customer data, call history and any legacy sales deals information up to date and within one central location. Call barge and whisper mode interactions can be captured and noted down in the CRM contact record history. This will help you keep track of all client records and deals, flagging any tricky conversations. Zadarma has a free to access, multifunctional CRM, Teamsale. It’s completely free to access, regardless of the number of employees your company has. Teamsale CRM can assist with automating all traditional customer management processes without any additional costs.

Make time to improve call performance

If you are a call centre manager who wants to better understand the duration of your sales journey, or you may want to have more clarity of your team’s strengths and weaknesses to explore training opportunities, then they will need to have a full context of the end to end sales cycle. This data can often be found through an integrated VoIP-CRM dashboard as well as through utilizing call recordings tools. Call recordings allow you to monitor call transcriptions. This will provide essential insights into call performance and your sales cadence. These reports will show the average time it takes a sales representative to close a deal with different clients. Managers can explore the number of calls, touch points, call duration and speech recognition within each call. This can provide insight into the customer service and sales cycle and whether there are training requirements. Monitoring your employees’ call performance, allows you to track your call handling team’s strengths and weaknesses, so you can make adjustments and modifications to improve the way calls are handled. Call metrics will help you identify the exact points in the customer journey where agents (or customers) are struggling the most.

Empower the best team- working on the go

It has been proven that many call centre employees are happy and more productive when they have the opportunity to work from home as well as being able to easily access communication solutions while commuting. The beauty of VoIP phone systems is that you can access them through the cloud, online. This means you don’t have to staff a large office and pay infrastructure costs. As an additional bonus, you can also recruit the best talent from anywhere in the country. You are not restricted to people who are able to come into the office every single day.

In conclusion

Call centres are an important way to retain loyal customers. Customer churn happens when an existing customer leaves your business for a competitor. VoIP powered call centre solutions can significantly improve your internal process, communication efficiency and time management. When VoIP PBX phone system features are utilised correctly, they can significantly improve the level of customer service your business can offer.

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Featured image credit: Quino AI/Unsplash.

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• Source: https://dataconomy.com/2023/10/09/how-to-improve-call-centre-customer-service/