Call Center Management

What is a call center management system?

A call center management system streamlines the development, implementation, and monitoring of the call center’s internal and external communication process. The primary beneficiaries of effective call center management are the agents and existing and potential customers.

Effective call center management requires a deep understanding of the shortcomings and gaps within the call center. 

In short, here are some of the areas where call center management can come in handy - 

• Customer-facing communications
• Agent training and employee retention
• Automation of business processes
• Workforce management like agent scheduling 
• Analyzing call center data - both real-time and historical
• Inbound and outbound communication strategies, e.g., inbound call flow design and outbound dialer strategy

What are the roles and responsibilities in a call center?

To execute a well-operated call center, it is crucial to have the roles and responsibilities in place and in order. Defined below are some of the roles and responsibilities that make a call center complete.

Let us understand the key roles and responsibilities of call center managers, supervisors, and agents in detail -

Call center manager

The lead operator and, often, the call center owner is the manager. Some of the critical tasks of a manager include evaluating and meeting customer needs, defining agents' and supervisors' performance, identifying opportunities to enhance customer experience, etc.  

Sneak peek into some of the call center manager's responsibilities: 

• Setting, defining, and measuring call center sales and customer service goals
• Handling employee training materials by creating and updating them.
• Hiring supervisors and call center agents. 
• Develop HR policies for the call center. 
• Decision-making on the selection of call center and other business communication softwares. E.g., CRM platforms, workforce management apps, team collaboration tools, etc.
• Reviewing real-time and historical call center analytics.

Call center supervisor

Talking about training, monitoring, and assisting call center agents with customer interactions, a call center supervisor is the go-to person. The critical roles of a call center supervisor include ensuring that customer service strategies are carried out smoothly, and the manager's expectations are met. 

Sneak peek into some of the call center supervisor's responsibilities: 

• Onboarding and training of employees. 
• Real-time monitoring between agent and customer calls. 
• Scheduling of agents.
• Evaluation of individual performance. 
• Passing along call recordings and transcriptions after reviewing them to upper management.
• Keeping track of ineffective or outdated materials.

Call center agents

Call center agents are customer-facing representatives who take care of any issues from the customer. Call center agents are the face of the business and work under the instructions of managers and supervisors. 

Sneak peek into some of the call center agent's responsibilities: 

• Handling marketing calls or outbound sales. 
• Providing technical support or customer assistance.
• Updating customer accounts. 
• Responding to customer complaints. 
• Problem-solving via empathy and smooth communication with customers.

Head of the Call Center

The responsibility of the Head of a Call Center may vary depending on the specific organization and industry, but generally, the Head of a Call Center is responsible for overseeing the day-to-day operations of the call center and ensuring that it runs smoothly and efficiently. 

Sneak peek into some of the call center head's responsibilities: 

• Managing and training call center staff.
• Implementing and maintaining call center technology and systems.
• Monitoring and analyzing call center performance.
• Develop strategies to improve customer satisfaction and achieve business goals.
• Setting and managing the call center budget.

Customer Service Director

A Customer Service Director is responsible for overseeing the customer service team and ensuring that customer inquiries and concerns are handled effectively and efficiently. 

Sneak peek into some of the call center customer service director's responsibilities: 

• Managing and training customer service staff.
• Implementing and maintaining customer service policies and procedures.
• Monitoring and analyzing customer service performance.
• Developing strategies to improve customer satisfaction and retention. 

Customer Experience Officer (CXO)

A Customer Experience Officer is responsible for overseeing the customer experience and ensuring that it is positive and consistent across all touchpoints. 

• Developing and implementing strategies to improve the customer experience.
• Monitoring and analyzing customer feedback and metrics.
• Working closely with other departments within the organization to coordinate efforts and ensure alignment with overall business goals.
• Managing customer experience budgets and resources. 
• Training and developing customer experience teams to ensure they have the skills and knowledge necessary to deliver excellent customer experiences.

Additionally, various call centers have call quality auditors, trainers/coaches, resource planners, and HRs, as per structural requirements.

What makes a call center successful?

Making a call center successful is not a piece of cake. 

But don’t worry! Technology is known to break barriers, and call centers are in line. 

We have divided the building blocks to create a thriving call center into three categories. 

1. The team
2. The technology used, and
3. The customers

1. The team members

Imagine a restaurant serving authentic dishes. What if the role of the cook changes frequently? 

Looks like a bad picture, right? 

A constantly changing cook will lead to variations in the taste and prolonged time wasted in training every time. You will probably end up with unsatisfied customers who might NOT want to return to your restaurant. 

Now imagine the same situation in your call center. 

Your business and satisfied/unsatisfied customers have your call center team as the bridge. The team comprises managers, supervisors, agents, etc. 

A study in 2019 says that the turnover rates in call centers in the U.S. range from 30% to 45% on average.

These issues can be sorted out using a call center management system. How a call center management system solves these issues is of profound importance. 

Building a robust training program, pointing out the scope of progress to agents, and rewarding success will inspire the team to go the extreme mile in staying motivated. 

With a happier workforce, the chances of customer retention will be increased.  

2. The technology used

As discussed above, disorganized systems create a huge gap between the business and customers. 

With a lack of training on tools, agents’ quality of delivering tasks can degrade. Successful call centers use tech stacks integrated into their systems for optimized performance. 

Some of the benefits of introducing a call center management system in your call center are:

• Improves KPIs that are critical. 
• Increases ROI and reduces overall costs. 
• Keeps teams happier and reduces employee turnover. 
• Reduces churn rate. 
• Aids in creating omnichannel support for customers. 

3. The customers

A call center cannot be successful without happy customers. PERIOD.

To achieve the much need of satisfied customers, the easiest and most effective step would be to set up an automated call center. 

Customer experience management is the hour's talk, especially after the Covid-19 pandemic. Customers appreciate good service from scratch. 

In short, the key to providing a good customer experience is reciprocating with empathy, addressing concerns, and answering queries whenever it arises with practical solutions. 

To track whether you are putting 100% effort into your customer’s satisfaction, here are some key points to look out for -

• Responsiveness
  A report revealed that only 20% of companies could resolve their customers’ queries in full in the first call.
  It is vital to pay attention to the responsiveness of your agents to win happy customers, which can be achieved by call center management.
• Transparency
  Customers are fond of transparency. Some key metrics you can keep an eye on to ensure your call center agents prioritize customer experience are average handle time(AHT), first call resolution(FCR), customer satisfaction rating(CSR), and hold time.
• Empathy
  Be it any situation, call center agents need to make sure that they handle the customers with empathy.
  Ensuring customers that they will be treated with empathy at any time builds loyalty and trust toward your business.
  With empathy in tone and gratitude in conversations, companies can often avoid rough situations, including high-escalation cases.

Why is productivity important in a call center?

To keep a business afloat with growth, productivity is the fuel. 

Similar is the case for call centers. Call centers need a well-structured system in place for productivity. Quality assurance ensures service standards are gauged but often fails to identify agent behavior leading to trends in winning or losing. 

Listed below are some tips to keep call center productivity advanced-

1. Effective training
   Before taking responsibility, every employee goes through some kind of training. Training the call center agents is crucial for skill enhancement and improving agent productivity.
2. Reward
   ‍Agents often get motivated by incentives. Gamification is a great way to induce call center agents to give their 100%. It can be done by either providing reward points, vouchers, or simply honoring with employee awards.
3. Reducing dependency
   ‍Reducing customer dependency on agents often leads to better productivity in the call center.
   Call centers have a huge amount of ongoing tasks every day. With some functions automated, employees can focus on more complex tasks while customers can find self-help in resolving any grievances without needing human help. 
4. Introduce analytics
   ‍To improve call center productivity and call center agents’ productivity metrics, analysis can be of substantial assistance. 
   Introduction of analytics aids in getting insights that accelerate time-consuming tasks and create more room for improvement.  
5. Channel integration
   ‍Integration of channels opens a gateway for customers to reach out for queries. It also directly implies an increased first call resolution. 
   With call centers being able to provide a platform with better customer experience, productivity and success are inevitable.

Call center metrics you should know

Listed below are some of the important call center metrics that a call center must follow to track productivity and progress. 

1. Average handle time
   AHT metric measures the average time between an agent picking up a call and disconnecting the call.
2. First call resolution
   FCR is the percentage of calls where agents address the caller’s issues seamlessly and avoid transferring, escalating, and returning the calls.
3. Average call abandonment rate
   The amount of callers who hang up before an agent is connected is measured by the average call abandonment rate.
4. Average time in queue
   The amount of time callers are stuck in a call queue divided by the number of calls answered is the average time in queue.
5. Average speed of answer
   This is the average time taken by agents to answer a call within a specified amount of time.
6. Occupancy rates
   Occupancy rates are the amount of time agents are on live calls or the amount of time agents take to finish work related to the calls.
7. Customer satisfaction rates
   Customer satisfaction rates is the percentage of customers that feel that your business is meeting their needs or expectations.

Call center challenges and solutions

Managing a call center effectively requires knowledge of certain problems and their respective solutions. 

1. Customer satisfaction rates
   ‍
   Problem: "Customer service should not be a department. It should be the entire company." - Tony Hsieh - Taylor Chastain
   Without customer satisfaction, a business will always be vulnerable to a stunt in growth or even worse. Often bad customer experiences lead to a rise in escalated cases which can drive a business south.
   Solution: With the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, businesses are getting back on their knees, and competition is cut-throat.
   A happy customer tends to spread the good word about your business which helps in scaling your business.
   Here are a few solutions that can make a huge difference in tackling customer satisfaction,
   1. Peer learning
   2. Training materials
   3. Introduction of call monitoring software.
   4. Transparency within the organization
   5. Organized system
   ‍
2. Awareness of the problemProblem: Often, the problems to issues are difficult to identify. Some issues within the call center are hard to trace, and often this can lead to misjudgment in finding the real cause.
   These problems affect the business as a whole and create walls between the business and customers. 
   ‍Solution: Call center management systems play a vital role in identifying the root causes of issues that might arise from situations that often go unnoticed. 
   With the insights drawn from call center software, agents’ strengths and weaknesses can be recognized, and training sessions can be assigned accordingly. 
   Considering all the benefits, call center software helps create the much-needed robust workforce for a business to triumph.
   ‍
3. Employee productivity
   
   Problem: Tracking employee productivity can be a gruesome task without proper and accurate data. With monotonous work schedules, tight targets, and a lack of supervision, productivity might often slip through the cracks.
   Solution: To get every employee to reach their full potential without overburdening them is the right way to boost productivity.
   But how?
   Employees can be motivated to be productive in various ways. After all, a productive workforce will always be the spine of a successful business.
   Here are some ways to boost employee productivity-
   1. Reward system
   2. Introduce automated dialers
   3. Implement call forwarding
   4. Proper coaching
   5. Analytics to keep track of performance
   Last, but not least, these factors can be easily achieved by introducing call center software that saves time and efforts and brings out the best for you.
   ‍
4. Employee absenteeism
   
   Problem: Some of the common causes of employee absenteeism are-
   1. Poor scheduling
   2. A lack of staffing planning
   3. Outright miscommunication
   Solution: Workforce management in call centers is a perfect way to understand and break open the issues of absenteeism.
   At times like today, where remote call centers are existent, employees need to be understood hand-in-hand with being monitored. Call center solutions help in keeping track of leaves, shift timings, and their presence without much effort.

How Does Convin’s call center management increase sales by 21%?

Convin is a versatile software solution that doesn’t claim to solve your contact center woos but resolves many challenges with a few capabilities. Customer management and experience creation is one area that Convin can help. 

By employing automated tools and influencing agents' performance, increasing sales by 21% is only a matter of time. 

Let’s dive in and learn how Convin can help with sales.

1. Focus on active listening, and eliminate repetitive tasks
   Dedicatedly working on customer-centric tasks have a higher chance of creating the best customer experience.
   Ditch note-taking and manual call review. Focus on listening to the customer and developing strategies for high-quality follow-up meetings. In parallel, switch to automated call scoring and get 100% of calls reviewed without human interference.

2. Access to key customer moments
   ‍Conversation intelligence extracts critical moments from the call recordings to put forward customers' requirements for the next meeting. These key moments also reflect the customer's real intention and offer brownie points for creating a positive customer experience.

3. Discover call best practices
   Convin offers an intuitive insight dashboard that displays actions, behaviors, and phrases with a higher probability of call success. Investing in the best practices of top performers ensures higher sales in every contact center conversation.

4. Nurture customer-friendly agents
   Automated coaching targets and treats every agent as a unique entity and assists them in unlearning old tricks and learning customer-friendly methods. Personalized coaching can make every agent your best-performing agent and ensure exceptional CX delivery in every interaction.

5. Proactive measures with violation alerts
   One aspect of a call that can ruin customer experience is an unsolicited agent behavior that negatively impacts clients. Screaming, abusive language, misleading information, flawed statements, incorrect knowledge, and more are timely caught by Convin’s tool and alert the management team for corrective actions.

6. Learn customer sentiments
   Customer sentiment presents an accurate picture of a call. How was the customer's overall experience during the call? And presents the chances of a new call or a painful goodbye.

What Are The Other Product Capabilities Of Convin?

Convin monitors and analyzes 100% of calls automatically based on custom parameters set by your organization. The conversation analysis offers winning behavior identification and last-mile automated agent coaching.

Automated Quality Management

Convin’s call center tool automatically reviews 100% of customer calls, chats, and emails using custom call evaluation forms and spots agent performance challenges and unhappy customer conversations. Through automated quality management, managers and QA generate call scores that help establish coaching needs and staff dissatisfaction. 

Convin also allows auditors to do manual auditing on calls, chats, and emails and leave necessary feedback. 

Winning Behavior Identification

With the help of customer intelligence and custom-tracking , Convin presents parameters that drive positive and negative outcomes for the business. Spot violations, winning parameters,  customer sentiments, and threats to take proactive measures before customer calls.

Automated agent coaching

Convin’s system automatically generates coaching opportunities after reviewing agent performance. Based on the AI-driven call scores- good, average, and poor performers are identified, and the platform triggers personalized agent coaching based on the requirement. Coaching instances are extracted from the top performers' conversations and best practices. This method improves call handling quality and reduces supervisor escalations to a large extent.

Moreover, with Convin’s peer-to-peer coaching, managers and supervisors can add the best-performing agent’s conversations as a module into Convin’s library and assign it to agents who need further coaching. As a result of Convins’s automated agent coaching, businesses can reduce ramp-up time significantly and focus more on productivity. 

Conversation intelligence

CI records, transcribes, and analyzes conversations to generate call insights and transcriptions. The conversation intelligence software discourages manual conversation review and all other non-sales activities by automating notes, action items, and CRM entries.

Access agent performance KPI and customer experience quality criteria to produce consumable role-based custom reports pinpointing key challenges and opportunities. These reports are not only available on the Convin platform but are periodically emailed to the managers.

Convin’s Call Monitoring system is entirely safe

At Convin, we understand the customer and call data security importance; that’s why we ensure your data is completely secure and safe with our in-house transcription and NLP engine. We ensure call data security in the following ways:

• In-house transcription and NLP
• Secure login and monitoring
• Hosted on AWS
• SSL data encryption
• Role-based access control
• Enterprise-grade application monitoring
• GDPR compliant meeting recording

And Convin, as of now, supports English, Hindi, and Hinglish. And it takes less than a week to get you onboarded, so don’t wait, schedule a demo right away!