Top 4 Reasons Why An Effective Call Center Strategy Is So Important

Top 4 Reasons Why An Effective Call Center Strategy Is So Important

Did you know that your call center is the most forgotten piece in your marketing strategy? Businesses often forget just how important the call center really is. Spoiler alert: it’s literally at the very center of your company’s ability to grow. Here are the top 4 reasons why an effective call center strategy is so important.

1. Increase Employee Satisfaction

Could you use more calls? Do you have techs sitting around without anything to do and no jobs to go on? There’s nothing like boredom in the workplace to decrease motivation and overall employee satisfaction. However, by having an effective call center strategy in place and winning more jobs, you can really improve the satisfaction of your employees.

While more jobs and more work is one way to increase employee satisfaction, that’s not the only thing. It’s important to remember that your success as a business is dependent on the success of your call center. Your Customer Service Representatives will benefit from your leadership. Employees in any environment, at any job and in any industry, would find it hard to thrive without the proper training, coaching and support. According to VPI, 92% of call center leaders see huge value in sharing metrics, such as number of calls in queue, customer satisfaction, and first contact resolution. An effective call center strategy that monitors and measures does more than just help your business grow – it helps your employees grow. Monitoring calls can help you understand what needs to be improved on, and how you can help your employees feel good about the work they’re doing. Set them up with the right tools to succeed and thrive in your company.

2. Improve Customer Retention

The call center isn’t simply a means to an end. It’s a part of the customer journey that, without it, you never get to the sale. Your call center is the first line of response for almost every customer interaction you will have at your business. If your customers don’t have positive experiences when talking to your Customer Service Representatives, they likely won’t continue to do business with you. If you’re a small business owner, then you probably already know that you need a killer customer retention strategy in order to stay profitable. In your call center, you should implement the following:

• Ask for customer feedback – and act on it
• Anticipate the customer’s needs and offer what they want
• Design an easy experience for them
• Really listen to them

Your call center exists to serve people – your customers, specifically. But to serve them and serve them well, you need to have the right tools in your call center to do so. There are many scenarios you may come across in your call center – are you prepared to handle them all? Some scenarios you may find yourself running into include:

• Pricing is too high for the customer at this time
• Customer wants to cancel because they’re unhappy with one of your team members
• You don’t have appointments at the time the customer needs
• No one has returned the customer’s call, and they’re going elsewhere now

In order to retain current customers who may be starting to look at doing business with other companies, you need to evaluate how you manage them, re-define how you interact with them, and understand and listen to the problems they’re having. This is the only way you’ll be able to know how to retain your customers and not lose them to your competition.

3. Lead to Higher Conversions

Are you paying money for leads but not seeing any of them convert? The answer as to “why” could be right in your call center. The goal here is to convert more of your callers to customers and find out why they’re not already. Is it pricing? False advertising? Lack of availability? Or is it due to a lack of training in your call center? There are many ways you can increase your conversion rate, including:

• Make training a priority
• Encourage your Customer Service Representatives
• Call from a local phone number
• Focus on solving problems
• Follow up after the call
• Train your CSR’s to cross-sell (and offer an incentive for doing so)
• Reduce background noise
• Monitor every call

While all of these are important ways to increase your conversion rate, probably one of the most important one is to monitor each call. By monitoring your calls, you can know exactly what is going on in the call center and exactly what needs improvement.

4. Increase Your Sales (and Get More Money)

Did you know you could have $1MM already on the table in your call center – and not even know it? That’s likely because your call center is missing one major thing: a process. In order to increase your sales and make more money, you should be focused heavily on three things:

• Monitoring conversions
• Improving performance
• Creating a world class experience

In order to improve and continue to grow your revenue, you must measure. There are many metrics you can include in your call center strategy, including but not limited to:

• Average wait time
• Abandonment rate
• Customer retention
• Time to resolution
• First call resolution
• Average handle time
• Average interaction/customer

If you’re measuring and tracking the success in your call center, you can know exactly what needs to improve in order to continue to make more money and increase your sales year over year.

Need help in your call center? Get in touch with our team at VitalStorm. We can help you with all your call center strategy needs. Call us today at 877-311-5695 or visit more of our marketing tips here.