Your call centre’s chief function is to service customers and resolve their problems. By achieving this, a well-functioning, efficiently run contact centre will strengthen customer relationships, build loyalty and attract new customers to your business.
Yet for many financial services organisations, the stark reality is that the call centre can often be a source of complaints, resulting in reduced customer satisfaction and increased attrition levels. And coupled with poor employee performance and multiple inefficiencies, operating costs can be far higher than they should be.
“The ladder of success is best climbed by stepping on the rungs of opportunity.”
Unique Challenges
Of course, each business faces it own unique challenges, but there are 6 operational challenges that are common to a great many firms in the FS sector. So even if metrics show the call centre is performing well, these are the areas where further gains can most readily be delivered.
- Paid vs login levels
- Shrinkage
- The detailed make-up of the Average handling time
- Adherence to work schedule rosters
- Quality of output
- Volume of output
Average handling time is of course a critically important parameter to measure for forecasting, yet in many call centres more time is spent wrapping calls than actually speaking to customers. Poor login levels are also a frequent problem, adding to pressures on call answering times. In fact, sub-optimal performance in any of these key areas is certain to have a dramatic effect both on customer outcomes and operating costs.
Precision, Control & Volumes
Problems can also be caused by a lack of precision in task identification, poor management control, artificially inflated volumes and a failure to accurately measure outputs, all of which will adversely impact overall efficiency and quality to the customer.
To ensure your staff maintain a tight focus on key deliverables, it’s essential that managers and team members know precisely what is expected of them and ‘what good looks like’. This means applying a comprehensive set of metrics and monitoring individual performance against defined KPIs. With clear performance metrics in place, managers can then monitor their teams throughout the day, week and month and respond rapidly to any deviations from the norm, rewarding when appropriate, and coaching when required in ‘real time’ when it makes the most difference.
“Quality is never an accident. It is always the result of intelligent effort.”
Improving efficiency and quality
There are four key areas of focus when seeking to improve operational performance:
- Organisation of work
- Management processes
- Quality control
- Waste elimination
By applying the correct frameworks to monitor the right metrics, you can drive inefficiencies out of your call centre operations, delivering significantly increased capacity, reduced costs, improved quality outputs and enhanced customer satisfaction. You can quickly regain control of your operations, improve GOS and, ultimately, create happier, stickier customers.
Consistent delivery creates credibility.
