8 Tips For Improving Productivity At Your Contact Centre

When running your contact centre, productivity is the key to great quality service and happy customers and clients. As well as making sure you use the best outbound call centre companies, you also need to get the best out of your team.   To make sure your team is performing to the best of their ability and providing callers with the best possible resolutions, there are a few things you can do. Check out our top 8 tips to improving productivity.

Employee Wellness

Ensuring your team has a high physical, and mental wellness level is pivotal to your business’s continued success, and key to improving productivity.  Promoting positive mental health in your workplace is a great step in the right direction but acting to actually improve it for your team is another matter entirely. Contact centres, as with other high-pressure environments, can understandably be stressful to work in. Ensure your team feels comfortable to talk about any struggles they’re having with their workload or even pressures outside of work. It would be best if you didn’t treat your team like machines—let them know that you genuinely care about their wellbeing and take steps to help improve it for everyone.

Motivation

Nothing boosts your employees’ productivity more than good motivation. Relying on that you’re paying your team for their time and effort doesn’t cut it anymore. Having a good understanding of your team’s needs and struggles is pivotal to showing that you’re both a good leader and care about them as people, not just workers. Working in communications can bring some tough challenges, so be sure to reward your team regularly for hard work and dedication. As well as rewards, make sure to show that you appreciate their time and effort often, so they don’t just feel like another cog in the machine.

Contact Software

Making good use of the best communication software available is a perfect way to improve productivity and your customers’ receptiveness. For example, speaking to someone on a bad phone line can increase the likeliness of not listening to the other person as you’ll be fixated on the connection, or you may not be able to hear them properly at all.

As well as having good tech and software on board, if your team is working from home as part of a hybrid working system, you’ll want to make sure you’re properly set up as a cloud-based contact centre. Gamma’s Horizon cloud contact centre is a great example of a quality and efficient system that provides your team with an easily accessible and simple to use call interface to help boost productivity and speed. This smart system also allows the agent to manage their customer interactions via one database and integrate with other CRM systems.

Expert Training

Whilst every company tends to provide some comms training to their contact centre staff, this can often come in fundamental training, relying on actual real-world experience to do the rest of the work for you. Real experience is an essential part of the learning process, of course. Still, failing to provide you, new team members, with adequate, expert learning can increase the risk of big mistakes and even increase employee turnover as people feel too unprepared.

Performance Metrics

This is a widespread term in time-based industries, and it can be easy to focus on this data to see an evidence-based increase or drop in performance. There are numerous ways to improve the efficiency of your team’s calls, and there are countless resources online with professionals giving their optimal methods to improve these. However, rushing through resolutions to hit targets and meet deadlines without providing good quality customer service will hurt your business far more in the long run than not meeting those deadlines. Find a good balance between those performance goals and aim for both quality and quantity in equal measure.

First Contact Resolution

This leads to something known as first contact resolution. If your workers are rushing through their calls or failing to provide adequate guidance and assistance to customers and clients, you’ll find that recurring calls will begin taking up a lot of your time. Teaching your team to handle customer needs properly and ensure that their problem has been solved on the first call is imperative to a streamlined process.

Reduce Turnover

One of the biggest setbacks for a business, especially one that operates on efficiency, confidence and skill, is a high employee turnover. If you’re constantly having to replace staff that couldn’t handle the workload or are finding better opportunities, you’re going to be investing a lot of time and effort into training those new team members. Additionally, those new team members are likely to be much less efficient and therefore less productive than your experienced workers who have left. Creating a positive environment for your team and reducing the rate at which people leave is ideal for continued productivity and further growth and sets the scene for improving productivity. You can focus your efforts on expanding your team rather than replacing staff. Treat your team right and offer them great incentives to stay with you, and they’ll reward you with great quality work and dedication.