Contact Center Obstacles – How to Get Past Them

The first lines of customer support are contact centers! This is why addressing the most basic concerns regarding customer experiences begins with addressing issues with your contact center partner.

Contact centers may be difficult places to work, resulting in higher expenses, agent absenteeism, and agent turnover. Dealing with all these while lowering customer service quality, team morale, and effectiveness is no easy task!

While your company and contact center are unique, common industry concerns tend to reoccur. What problems do you expect in your contact center, and how do you intend to solve them? We’ll go over seven of the most prevalent contact center issues, as well as remedies to make them a thing of the past.

Contact Center Issues and Resolutions:

1. Agent Exodus

Employee attrition is at the top of the list. Turnover has always been a problem in high-volume employment situations, such as call centers. Working in a small cubicle for 9-10 hours a day (or working from home), fielding calls from disgruntled customers, while also receiving poor pay and few benefits — it’s easy to understand why agents perceive contact center job as difficult and may not see it as a potential profession.

Even the most driven contact center personnel might get disillusioned if their development options are limited or their job tasks are extremely routine. As a consequence, agents and workers experience significant levels of burnout, attrition, and poor performance.

Solution: Acknowledge, Reward, Train … and make it fun!

Most agents only speak with their supervisors when they are confronted with a problem. To turn the tide, contact center managers must recognize and praise their employees’ efforts and exceptional performance. This straightforward approach fosters trust, enhances agent-manager ties, and infuses good energy into the workplace.

Rewarding dedicated call center agents for a job well done also keeps them engaged and interested. Regularly benchmark your incentives, rewards programs, and friendly contests with the perks and salaries of similarly situated contact centers in your industry.

It is critical for experienced and motivated agents to properly conduct a discussion and build client trust.

Traditional training approaches for coaching agents are sometimes time-consuming and unsuccessful. Instead, the agent should learn to provide value to the organization by allowing them dialogue within their teams and ranks.

Don’t forget to make it fun. Managers may restructure their contact center into a customer-centric operation by inspiring staff engagement and accomplishment with the correct game mechanics, tools, strategies, and approaches. Games are an excellent approach to fostering a healthy business culture and making work more enjoyable!

2. Not handling dissatisfied customers quickly

Low customer satisfaction ratings are one of the most damaging to your organization when it comes to solving contact center difficulties.

They not only drive away existing clients but also impede you from attracting new ones.

Callbacks from past, unsolved complaints account for 30% of contact center call traffic. Even if the call center rewards clients for their negative experiences, it takes more than five pleasant encounters to compensate for the negative one.

Solution: Enhance Skills-based routing, pay attention to customer polls,
and reevaluating your KPIs frequently

A successful skills-based routing protocol is the best way to increase customer happiness and loyalty. This system gathers information about customers’ wants and promptly routes their calls to the most relevant agent or department by providing a more customized experience from the outset.

More complex systems prioritize high-value callers to the head of the waiting list, ensuring that the team never loses a high-value client even if all agents are occupied.

Make your consumers the focus of attention at your contact center by soliciting comments and thoughts regularly. Customers can tell you a lot about your goods, services, and agents. Feedback is critical for evaluating agent performance, and the data aids tremendously when it comes to reducing issues on the floor.
Furthermore, measures used to evaluate agent performance have the potential to negatively impact customer service. AHT, or Average Handle Time, puts pressure on agents to handle calls in a set period of time, causing them to transfer calls more than required, “accidentally” being terminated, and giving generic replies or service. Examine your metrics scorecard to ensure that agents are concentrating on the KPIs that genuinely matter.

3. Failure to prioritize employees

What are the difficulties of working as a contact center agent? Almost everything an agent does produces a stressful circumstance they must eventually deal with. Agents are pressured to keep up contact center performance and customer satisfaction, while balancing average handle time, low morale, and a variety of other problems. Because conventional measurements typically disregard quality, they make it harder for agents to develop. Overworked agents aren’t a happy lot.
Effective contact centers prioritize their clients but occasionally overlook their own employees. In truth, consumer satisfaction (CSAT) and employee satisfaction (ESAT) are more often utilized KPIs.

Solution: Pay attention to Non-Traditional Metrics

Zero in on qualitative and quantitative indicators, such as Net Promoter Scores, balanced scorecards, and real-time customer feedback, which all contribute to higher performance levels. Customers are more likely to be satisfied when their contact center representatives are happy as well!

4. Too Many Tools

Many contact centers rely on several, old software systems and tools to assist with day-to-day operations, rather than a single, more modern platform. This suggests that agents are opening and closing up to 10 different apps to respond to a single question, and that they are spending a large amount of time on administrative tasks. All of that juggling gets in the way of providing an excellent client experience.

As per the American Psychological Association, even brief cognitive obstacles caused by task-switching may result in a productivity loss of up to 40%.

Solution: Integration

Companies often adopt new feature-specific software that seamlessly integrates into their current contact center. Get to know your contact center partner’s protocols and check to see if their system is streamlined enough for efficiency.

5. Agents Do Not Keep Information Well

Some contact center issues stem from your agent’s ability to simply remember important information. For example, you may be doing onboarding training sessions for the new recruits and providing them with all of the information they need, but this is a lot of knowledge to take in at once. However, when it comes time to use their expertise during a client contact, it’s possible that they won’t recall everything. As a result, performance is lower than expected and your contact center managers are continuously assisting their agents.

Solution: Design engaging and ongoing training sessions. (Make it fun for everyone.)

Continuous training is an excellent approach to reinforce positive practices, exchange information, and address bad behaviors. It’s typical for knowledge to not always soak in right away. We’ve all experienced “information overload,” therefore it’s critical to regularly refresh and discuss any developments since the previous session.

It is critical to provide unique, innovative training options that depart from the standard classroom setting. Consider including your agents in the design and development of learning modules such as generating multimedia presentations, short quizzes, or even organizing your next team excursion.

A cxperts, we make efficiency, engagement, and technology fun. Get past these centered obstacles as swiftly and as painlessly as possible.