Call monitoring is one of the easiest and most lethal tools for supervisors to check the progress of the agent’s work. It gives them a consistent amount of information about agents’ activity and customers’ expectations. 

Additionally, whatever the nature of business is, call monitoring provides a glance at an agent’s performance and training needs. 

Generally, managers monitor the calls of the agents to ensure that the call center workflow and workforce runs effectively and provides excellent service to customers. 

As I said, call monitoring is one of the best ways to check agents’ progress and productivity with objectives and planned expectations. 

Let’s continue reading this blog to explore call monitoring techniques, their benefits, and how to make the most of this call quality assurance method.

What is Call Center Call Monitoring? 

Simply, monitoring means observing and checking the progress or quality of (something) over a while. 

In business terms, it is used as a systematic review model. In the call center industry, call monitoring refers to the process of hearing (listening) to calls to improve customer service.

So, does that mean “it is done with the only criteria to improve customer service?”

Nope! Call monitoring uses the information that happens between agents and customers, but it also helps agents, managers, and the entire company. 

Various Benefits/Advantages of Call Monitoring

Let’s figure out how call monitoring helps the company itself and its stakeholders. 

A) Call monitoring benefits for call center agents.

The managers or the supervisors listen to live or recorded calls to assess the quality of the customer’s services, and of course, expectations. It also gives ideas to pinpoint employers’ training needs. 

• Increasing agent performance.
• Improving employee satisfaction.
• Facilitating quick interaction b/w manager and agent.

B) Call monitoring benefits for call center managers.

As you know, managers look into the facts and insights of recorded calls, this gives them a quick view of the scenario of what possibilities can be figured out to help agents to enhance customer experience. 

• Identifying problems quickly and systematically.
• Assessing compliance issues.
• Focusing training efforts.
• Facilitating employee development.
• Pinpointing customer frustrations.
• Identifying inefficient and broken procedures.

D) Call monitoring benefits for customers.

Call monitoring is a process to listen to an agent’s conversation with customers and later, figure out the best way to help agents in further actions. An effective call monitoring system brings quality benefits to customers. 

• Increasing quality standards.
• Improving consistency of the experience.
• Increasing service quality.
• Increasing agent effectiveness.

E) Call monitoring benefits for the call center/company. 

The contact center organisation wants to gauge and sustain the customer’s experience for better results. However, call monitoring somehow helps the organization to achieve its objectives without any compromise. 

• Improving the customer experience.
• Increasing first contact resolution.
• Improving call center performance.
• Delivering consistently excellent service.
• Increasing sales and service performance.
• Enhancing customer loyalty, satisfaction, and the customer experience

Now that you have gained knowledge about call monitoring benefits. Continue reading to know about call monitoring systems and tools to improve your call monitoring logic. 

Also Read: What is the Connection Between ASA and Service Level?

Bonus: Call Monitoring System and Tools 

Surprisingly, a cloud-based call monitoring system and the tool allow you to do more than just listen to calls. A call monitoring system or tool will offer the following features:

1. Double-Listening: This features brief you to passively listen to the agent’s conversation and rectify any feedback to cater to customer service quality. 
2. Murmuring: Whispering can be a powerful tool designed to be used during agents’ training periods. Herein, supervisors can speak directly to the agents during phone calls with the customers in order to support, guide, and provide tips to resolve calls perfectly. 
3. Call Recording: It is primarily used in training processes to train and guide agents to listen to veterans record calls and learn more about selling techniques, etc.
4. Call Barging: Call bargaining is a great feature to assist agents during a conversation with customers. Supervisors can provide their inputs on live calls and speak with both agents and customers. 

Conclusion 

Now that you’re well aware of how call monitoring is important to manage. And, when done in the right way, it brings useful and potential benefits to the agents, company, and customers. The final tip I want to give to you is to collect feedback from your agents as this extensively helps you to draft more appealing training sessions.

Thanks for reading this blog  

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A contact center provides superior quality calling solutions for both i.e. inbound calls and outbound calls. If you have ever experienced call center solutions, you probably also experienced their services closely. 

And, may hear the term, ASA and Service Level. But what do they really mean? 

In this blog, we’ll explore the connection between ASA and Service Level and will also look into some hacks to improve it better.

The call center uses several KPIs to measure the success and performance of businesses and agents, respectively. Among many, ASA and Service Level are arguably the most important ones. 

What is Service Level? 

Simply, Service Level refers to the measurement of the performance of a service given by an agent in a call center. The service level is expressed in numerical expressions, in percentage. 

For example, a contact center with an 80/20 service level answers 80% of calls within 20 seconds.

Service level is displayed as two numbers – the first number i.e. 80 indicating the percentage of calls answered. The second number i.e 20 indicating the target time in seconds. 

Additionally, the service level refers to the achievement of specific goals as mentioned below: 

• Percentage of calls answered in a call center.
• The percentage of customers holding time on a call.
• Percentage of all parts of an order being fulfilled completely.

It is important to steady the service level for better results. If an agent takes a long time to answer the call or is put on hold for a long time, it surely disturbs the customers and left in dissatisfaction.

The best way to keep the service level optimized is through motivating the agents or bringing gamification into the action. 

What is ASA? 

ASA stands for Average Speed of Answer, is a part of service level and a kind of KPI as well. It is referred to as the average wait time callers spend on hold or waiting for the agent to speak with him/her. 

Generally, ASA is represented in seconds. For instance, 10 seconds, 20 seconds, and so on.

It is not denied that long waiting-time or long hold times result in frustrated customers. That is why it counts as the top-prior metric of call centers to manage.

How It is Measured? With An Example

There are no multiple manners or formulas to calculate ASA. There is only one and mentioned below.

ASA is calculated by: 

ASA = Total Wait Time for Answered Calls/Total # of Answered Calls.

Imagine you call customer care to speak with an agent for a solution. The moment the IVR puts you on hold before the agent speaks to you is referred to as the frequency of answering calls. 

In other words, the time taken by an agent to answer or connect to the connect is called ASA. 

Why Is Average Speed of Answer Important?

It is important from the two aspects…!

First, ASA is important because it gives call center agents the information and tools they need to do their jobs effectively.

Second, it has a relationship with the Interactive Voice Response System which notifies the agent to be prepared to receive a call.

How Are ASA and Service Level Connected?

The Average Speed of Answered Calls and Service Level are important metrics to consider for a call center. These metrics offer specific results when measured in terms of performance. 

Like, the Service level is a niche for indicating how efficiently and quickly your agents are addressing customer customers while ASA indicates the time taken to respond the customer concerns. 

They are different so much, in fact, they both impact each other to a great extent. How? 

For example, an 80/20 service level is a strong service level. But if your ASA is high — say, 20 seconds — it means there’s a big deviation in service quality for your remaining 20% of callers.

Also, a lower service level will naturally reduce your ASA, so it’s important to keep these two metrics running in parallel.  

Tips for boosting your Service level and ASA

Well, it is not hard to observe where your agent falling or being a cause for unproductive results. Using KPIs you can instantly figure out the performance and their production rates and in this way, you can plan your strategies to achieve better results.

Here are some tips you can consider in time of need when facing lower agents’ productivity concerning Service Level and Avg. Speed of Answering Calls. 

Tip#1: Call volume forecasting.

Look into your past data and analyze call volume trends. Check for the consistent spikes using periodic filters – day, week, month, and year. 

Tip#2: Strategic staffing

When you look into data history, you would be able to identify certain peek times and be able to align your staffing efforts. This would also help you in knowing which agent is available during busy times.

Tip#3: Call-back technology

Call back technology is a brilliant solution to optimize Service level and Average Speed of Answer. It saves you in times of crisis i.e. leads ineffective management of bulk calls. This also eliminates callers waiting on hold and enhances the customer experience. 

Also Read: Tips to Enhance Customer Experience During Lockdown

In the end, it is not enough to simply rely on percentages. Proper measurement and adaptable strategies should consider outliers. 

Answering calls and providing solutions should not be the ultimate target of agents. They should work upon bringing efficiency in calling, communication, and speed. They should also be concerned about the customer experience across their entire journey.

The post What is the Connection Between ASA and Service Level? appeared first on Girnar Care.

Isn’t it…

There are many ways to improve call center agents’ productivity and performance. And you may have used a number of ways to motivate your employees. But, did you impose gamification yet? 

No, So sad

Gamification changes the negative attitude of the employee, drives motivation, and creates a culture in which more productivity can be achieved and, in turn, get rewarded and recognized. 

The word ‘Gamification’ may sound similar to a game or puzzle. Gamifying inherits game models that are strategies to evoke agents’ ability and their morale. Some of the most common games you can implement are The War Room, Bingo, Chase The Parcel, and Points Are Reward.

Gamification is not restricted to just a call center. Any size and nature of the business can think to implement because it is a universal theory like management. 

Why you should gamify your workplace? 

Gamifying your workspace creates an overall better environment. It leads to an competitive healthy workplace for agents to drive more engagement and where they can continuously improve in order to be rewarded on an ongoing basis. 

Here are more reasons to read about how gamification can keep call center agents’ motivated. 

1. Prompts Healthy Competition

Competition is everywhere! Whether it’s external with other market brands or internal between agents and policies. It is important to prompt healthy competition both inside and outside. With gamification inline, the workplace alludes to employees having a clear eye on the prize and this is the best way to create healthy competition and motivate staff to improve their performance. 

2. Encourages Inner Genius and Creativity

Gamification activities trigger agents to participate in the idea and to prove their ability. By incorporating into the subject of whatsoever drive motivation and encourage them to come out at full potential. 

Additionally, it activates creativity by stimulating them to think out of the box and extend minds for good results. 

3. Get performance insights

Performances and grades also help in motivating your employees. With gamification in the schema, you could collect crucial insights about each and every employee’s job roles as it gives you the ability to establish metrics and measure employee performance. 

From the collected data, you could see who is performing best and meeting goals, even who could benefit from a little extra training and coaching.  

4. Creates Team Collaboration

The best about gamification is that it creates team collaboration. To achieve a particular goal, you need a team that may lead you effectively and efficiently. Gamification gives you the enrapturing ability to organize a team in the way you want. With gamification metrics in hand, you can build a team with equal zeal and accomplished skills. In this way, you have an organized team of agents that will ensure increased productivity. 

Also Read: Top Metrics that Measure Call Center Performance

Things Need To Be Gamify In Your Workplace

There are many things you can gamify in your workplace. Right from creating a suitable atmosphere to change in training and development activities. Here’s a look at the things you can gamify in your premises for better results. 

• Reduce onboarding time
• Improve customer interactions
• Gamify learnings
• Gamify performance
• Agent’s morality and behavior
• Gamify the speed of calling functions such as Average speed of answer, first call resolution, average hold time, average handling time, etc

Call Center Gamification: Conclusion

Gamification brings focus, integrity, and values in agents which help them to deliver good results viz – good customer services, achieving goals in time, accomplishing job roles as per regulatory, and much more. 

Gamification is easy to implement just remember to look out for the areas where it should implement. Also, try to write down the queries in advance so the gamification process becomes easier. 

If you’ve implemented gamification in your call center, you increase the chance of profitability and bring healthy competition. But, in case you didn’t…it’s time to go through this blog. 

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Inbound call center agents essentially answer customer service queries as well as transactions.

It is important to monitor and analyse the agent’s performance. This is where a call scoring system comes into the picture.

What is Call Scoring? 

Call scoring is similar to the mathematical scale, and you may call it a tool that is used to evaluate your employees while they are on the phone with customers. 

In other words, it is a way to gauge top-tier customer service and improve the performance of your agents over time. 

Call Center Call scoring means scores given to the conversation occur between the customer and the relevant agent. The score could be asked to be given by the customer while on the conversation or after. 

The purpose of call scoring is to bring the quality of their calls in line with your company’s goals. 

Still difficult to grasp? Let’s take an example. 

Suppose you had a treatment with your doctor. One from the team of healthcare management calls you and asks for feedback. You have been asked to rate the doctor’s service from 0 to 5 where ‘0’ is the lowest and ‘5’ is the highest. The score you give to them is called call scoring. 

It could be an automated call rating system or real-time call scoring. 

The input is further being stored as feedback and the agent’s performance is judged on that basis. If the customer has rated the conversation five stars, it shows that the customer is happy and satisfied with the service as well as with the agent. 

There are several methods for call scoring. Here are some of them:

• Real-time call monitoring 
• Analyzing call records 
• Automated call rating systems

The possibility of the call scoring method usually depends on the number of agents being monitored. For large call scoring agent performance evaluation, the automated call rating system is preferred. 

Top-Notch Practices for Call Center Call Scoring

Now that you’re aware of the call scoring methods, it’s time to use them. 

See not all business functions are equal, so you need to choose appropriate call scoring methods. For this, you need to figure out the optimum monitoring criteria. 

Call scoring criteria help ensure your agents are evaluated without any wrong consent. This also enables you to judge one agent’s traits with another and help identify those that could benefit from extra practices or at least save you from preparing a development program. 

Do you know? You can use the Key Performance Index (KPIs) and metrics for agent performance. 

Take time and review these top practices on how to score your call center agents and improve your performance:

No.1 – Use Customer Suggestion 

Suggestions give a scope of improvement. By understanding what your customer tries to say via their reviews or feedback collection, you can actually bring better agent performance. 

After every call, make a habit to reach out to customers and ask them to provide feedback in some form. 

No.2 – Identify Unproductive Agent

In the corporate world, there is no value and space for unproductivity. An unproductive agent could be a cause for the upbringing of inefficiency, immorality, and unproductivity in your whole organisation.

Try to screen the struggling agents either weekly or monthly. It gives you where to focus your improvement efforts. 

No.3 – Consider Real-Time Statistics 

Real-time data is the fuel of modern call center success. Real-time monitoring provides various benefits such as making agents live easier, improving productivity, reducing agent attrition, improving customer satisfaction, and more. 

Using real-time statistics, agent progress can be tracked easily. It can also motivate them to improve the quality of their service and come out as productive agents.  

No.4 – Use Training and Development Program

The call center can improve call center representatives’ performance by providing them with continuous training. When your agents are well-trained they can handle most of the situation by themselves.

Consistent training helps your agents to attain their skills and make use of their abilities.

No.5 – Provide your Agents with Timely Feedback

Applauding agents for their good results is a great way to improve agent performance. They feel like motivated agents and see themselves as a productive employee for the organisation. 

When agents do something right, it needs to be shared. Therefore, timely feedback can be of great benefit for agents as well as a call center.

Also Read: How to Handle Stressed and Angry Customers

The Best Way To Use Call Scoring in Call Center

Here are some tips on how to make the best use of call scoring:

#1 Anticipate and react to your callers’ needs

A good agent always works on the notion to satisfy the callers’ needs. Call scoring can help in anticipating and providing a better solution to callers’ requirements. 

Together with your agents you can review calls systematically, and look into the improvement area to improve these conversations.

#2. Encourage healthy competition between your agents

Call scoring is also seen as a tool to promote healthy competition between your agents. Since each agent handles multiple calls in a day, the competition sets automatically. 

To measure the competition scale, call scoring is used and through the scores, each agent’s performance can be collected. 

Final Words 

This guide focuses on how to use call scoring to boost agent performance. I hope you gain a better understanding and insights to resolve your agent performance with this blog. For more information like this, please do visit Girnar Care Blog. 

The post What is Call Scoring? And How Is It Used To Improve Agent Performance? appeared first on Girnar Care.

In a call center, the ratio of company success is measured through agents’ performance.

An agent may involve in the aspects of multiple scenarios to understand the customer requirement. Once he/she understands their desires, they build a channel or bridge to trump the needs.

For this, they process multiple things which let in the development of KPIs, and these KPIs further help organisations to look at what they have done so far.

Today I gonna talk about top metrics that measures call center performance and how they help drive customer satisfaction.

What do metrics mean in a call center?

If you are a call center manager you would be familiar with this term. Generally, metrics are used as indicators to track and assess the status of a specific process.

In a call center, customer experience, agent productivity, and call center operations are some common metrics.

Although different call centers have different call center metrics and these metrics can be changed based on time and organisation policies.

Typically, the customer service manager deals with such metrics to measure performance which leads to monitoring key performance indicators (KPIs) to track how easily an organisation achieves its goals.

How is call center efficiency measured?

Going into the modern days, the contact center performs several operations in a day for many processes.

And these operations are managed by several agents working in different positions with differ in authorities.

Regardless of any operation, the agent collects information which is called data collection.

The customer service manager receives these data in bulk from different platforms that focus on different business processes.

Here metrics provide a clean-sheet way to monitor this data with a clear understanding of what to do next.

Honestly speaking, not all this data is required at once. The manager decides what to take and what to leave according to the metric role process. For example, a customer relationships manager might need one set of KPIs, but front-line managers may need different ones.

Additionally, the top-level executive requires strategic metrics and KPIs to sustain the flow of business for better customer service. On the other hand, the operational manager needs a completely different set of KPIs to learn customers’ preferences better and for workforce management.

Also Read: Call Center Metrics to Measure an Agent’s Productivity

Top call center metrics and KPIs

Metrics and KPIs often confuse readers with their meaning…!

Simply put, Metrics refer to the critical measures you need to achieve whereas KPIs refer to the real-time actions you put to either improve or achieve those measures.

Let’s discuss some popular call center performance metrics to track:

1) Average Call Abandonment Rate

These metrics represent the percentage of callers that disconnect the line before reaching an agent.

2) Percentage of Call Blocked

This type of metric is common in call centers and calculates the number of inbound callers that receive a busy tone.

3) Queue Waiting Time

This metric gives you the percentage of callers who are stuck in call queues. However, this is the most frustrating and common in a call center.

4) Service Level

This metric engrosses the agent productivity in real-time based on the number of calls answered.

5) Average Velocity of Answer

Calculates the average time it takes for agents to answer calls within a specific amount of time.

6) Median Handle Time

This metric tracks the median time, starting from when the agent begins spending time picking up the phone until it gets disconnected.

7) Average After Call Work Time

It tracks the average time taken by the agents to do work associated with a call after it’s finished.

8) Prior Call Resolution

It discrete the data of agents address caller’s issues without transferring, escalating, or returning the call.

9) Occupancy Rates

This metric shows the percentage of calls indicates how much time agents are on live calls. In other words, how long the conversation hold between the agent and caller.

What are the industry standards for call center metrics?

Metrics and KPIs are key essentials of workplace improvement. The use of data and metrics in the workplace helps organisation and put in the position to understand how day-to-day actions affect the rest of company operations.

However, call center knows their way of measuring performance. 70% of contact center service providers use common industry standards call center metrics.

However, these metrics fall into a particular course of the chapter and reveal key lessons into customer experience, customer loyalty, and quality alike. 

1. Customer Experience
2. Agent Productivity
3. Call Initiation
4. Call Center Operations

The following table consists of KPIs relative to its metric functions. Take a look…!

Since the majority of call centers shifting towards virtual call center premises, the change in metrics and KPIs is general. Additionally, these call center metrics may help you largely but lag against some modern definitive agendas such as quantum marketing or some other future concept that call centers may think to evolve.

Also Read: QA Metrics that call center must track for optimum customer service

Final Thought

The rule of thumb is that you need to establish a basic overview of metrics to measure the tendency of call center effectiveness. However, metrics and KPIs give you positive scope to look into the scenario deeply. But it also helps agents be more successful and reduce agent attrition.

This is where call center metrics help track call center productivity, guiding managers to choose the right tactics, and enhance customer satisfaction. In conclusion, if you want to track your call center KPIs, it’s better to take this guise into consideration and see where your organisation stand in.

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Imagine the scenario of handling stressed and angry customers without an experienced agent.

You ultimately lose leads worth a billion dollars without having talented employees.

And losing such a bet shouldn’t be an option in your business!

Thereby, it is important to focus on reducing agent attrition from the organization.

In fact, agent attrition has a nasty impact on call centers or any nature of the business.

In the context of call center infrastructure, the cost of losing one call center agent is pretty high.

When employees walk out, businesses have to spend time and money to replace them with new trainees. With such comprehensive work, this can drive down efficiency and profit margins.

But how do you reduce employee turnover?

This is where this blog comes into the picture. I’m going to talk about call center attrition, along with causes and high risks, and how it affects your business.

Afterwards, we will dive deeper into the 10 brilliant tips you can follow to reduce attrition rates at your call center.

Key Points of Discussion:

• What is Call Center Attrition?
• What Causes Call Center Attrition?
• In What Ways High Attrition Rates Can Affect Your Call Center? 
• 10 Brilliant Helpful Tips To Reduce Agent Attrition in Call Centers!

What is Call Center Attrition?

Call center attrition abbreviates to call center employees (generally agents) leaving the firm.

There can be a number of reasons to boycott the organization and switch to the new one.

The point of the talk is if your call center has a high number of agent attrition, surely it is bad – can subrogate current employees and impact the whole organization.

Managers should take primitive measures to handle attrition rates at a certain level to neutralize the problem.

But before that, you must use this equation to find out the attrition rate of your call center or contact center.

After perplexing the notion, your next step should be to analyze the area of attrition/cause.

What Causes Call Center Attrition?

As we said earlier, there might be multiple reasons to disown the organization. Here are some of the main reasons pin-point behind staff attrition in call centers or contact premises.

At a glance, Poorer Organizational Culture is generally seen as a primitive cause behind call center agent attrition. Building a strong team culture and mutual bonds can help teams feel less isolated.

Unfair and Lower-The-Bottom Subjective Treatment may also be another reason behind agent migration. For instance, wave a low review score in the face of agents and deny an increment or promotion.

At last, No Empowerment alludes to the agent attrition at a precedent rate. Not providing adequate resources to help callers, agents can feel helpless and unempowered.

These are some points where the agent stops expecting more from the company and decides to quit.

In What Ways High Attrition Rates Can Affect Your Call Center?

The high attrition rate is like a black widow for your organization that silently cracks and develops gaps b/w organization goals and employer productivity.

A high attrition rate in your call center can lead to:

• High Recruitment and Training Costs
• Reduced Customer Service Quality
• Difficulty in Implementing New Technologies
• Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and Cross-selling Issues
• Lead Them to Realising Overwhelmed and Unmotivated i.e. Lower Team Morale

In all of this, the company suffers a lot, and each department’s operations throttle disputedly.

That is why lower agent attrition is a key to attain company growth and build long-term relationships with clients.

Also Read: Ways to improve call center agent productivity and performance

10 Simple Tips to Reduce Attrition in Your Call Center

With these non-fail tips, your organization can easily reduce attrition and can pervade the gaps that have been created to shuttle call center objectives.

1) Hire The Right People

Lowering the staff attrition rate starts with recruiting the right candidates for the right position. This helps the organization in hiring potential and self-committed employees for relevant work responsibilities.

The best way to optimize hiring and recruiting sessions is by creating an ideal persona for call center agents, reckoning for job requirements, business values, and culture.

2) Enrich Training Process

Unlike any other industry employees, call center agents require contingent training to perform better and deal conveniently with the customers.

If the manager skips the training period or shortens the training session, he/she is omitting the areas of improvement for trainees and this would result in feelings of exclusion, inadequacy towards the organization.

3) Encourage Open Communication

Clear and open communication leads to better and thoughtful ideas in exchange. Asking call center agents for feedback on your systems and processes actually puts the agents in the position to interact with your seniors and helps them to know each other better.

Ask them which aspects they’re delighted with and what they think needs improvement.

4) Develop Friendly Team Culture

Most call centers think that call center culture resembles the team working together to achieve objectives. However, it is just a myth!

Simply put, the more call center agents feel isolated, the higher the chances of attrition. You can definitely prevent this by developing a friendly team culture that imparts a clear channel for employees’ communication, how they can work together, and how training happens in your call center.

5) Recognize Top Performers

Appreciating an employee’s good work is equivalent to regular feedback in preventing agent turnover.

When the manager notices the performance of the agent going beyond to serve customers, it is his duty to make sure they’re appreciated in front of the entire team. This excitingly makes performers feel encouraged to put more effort into keeping the customer happy next time.

6) Provide Long Term Career Plan For Employees

The interviewer often asks the interviewee,  “Where do you see yourself after five years?”. The phrase actually prompts the future aspect of learning.

And the same goes for call center agents. If agents fail to see their future at your call center, surely this results in high agent attrition. This happens because of pared-down development opportunities. If you show them promises and consider training them to help become a supervisor, it can pretty much lower the attrition rates.

7) Enhance Recognition and Rewards Programs

The organization culture alludes to R&R (Recognition and Rewards) program, the stronger and perceptible the culture the higher the notion of excellence productivity.

The manager should go beyond the bar to ensure they receive appreciation of what they have done and receive rewards when they meet key milestones or performance metrics. Tip it all, try to implement peer recognition and reward programs.

8) Pass On Autonomy Over Customer Interactions

You never know your agent’s sparkles and inner genius. To bottom down the rates of agents attrition, let them take ownership of customer interactions.

Additionally, set the guidelines for interactions but let your agents use their perpetual thinking and creativity to help callers find solutions. In this way, your agent will be more focused on serving new customers with passion and topical energy.

9) Leverage Trending Technology

Implementing right tools at the right time and right approach can proximate your organisation to capture new leads and improve agents’ interaction with customers.

Leverage new technology for your call center, if needed, train your agents, guide where they face problems. You may use tools like Proper VoIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) and IVR (Interactive Voice Response) software that can help call center agents handle callers more efficiently.

10) Interrogate Exit Interviews

Most organisations hold exit interviews to track and get familiar with the situation of an agent’s walkout. Instead of figuring out what went wrong, ask and deep dive into the case and offer agreeable solutions to block agent attrition.

Conducting an exit interview is helpful in generating positive attributes in your organization. Here are simple tips to organize exit interviews in an efficient manner.

• Drive an effective interview format
• Choose right interviewer
• Decide what to ask
• Decide what not to ask

Also Read: Tips to Reduce Hold Time in Your Call Center

In The End

It’s not only about agents but if you maneuver them you would certainly be at loss. Keep the focus on agent satisfaction, keep introducing new methods to sustain agents’ motivation at par. 

Consider this blog and understand the steps to reduce attrition rates at a call center. Need any help? Visit Girnar Care and get professional help from reputed call center agents.

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The statistics tell us that the way customer service reps respond to customers highly influence a customer’s purchase decision.

But how do you measure customer service? Have you set certain call center metrics to measure performance.

If not, then this is the right blog for you. We have mentioned the top 5 metrics that you should consider to measure customer success and your agent productivity.

Top 5 call Center Metrics

Call center metrics are also known as Key performance indicators(KPI’s). These KPI’s help to measure how well is the business achieving its goals. Likewise, it also helps to evaluate an agent’s complete performance and then award him for his achievements.

There might a zillion metrics depending upon business goals and a particular industry but then we have sorted out the top 5 one among them. So let’s get straight into it.

1. First Response Time (FRT)

By FRT, we mean the time between a customer raising a ticket to solve his query and a customer service rep responding to it.

The modern customer wants instant solutions. They don’t want to wait. With plenty of brands available in the market and if one brand doesn’t seem to fit in their expectation criteria, one wouldn’t take much time to change options.

They literally hate it when they have to wait for a very long time. So Keeping FRT at the bare minimum will keep your customers happy and build you a good brand image. A brand that keeps customers first. So make sure your agents take the lowest possible time to respond to customer queries in order to achieve desired business goals.

2. First Call Resolution

The clearest call center metric to measure performance.

First call resolution means the art of satisfying a customer wants and needs in the first go. The customer should not be kept in a situation where he is calling again and again for his issue. This definitely leaves a bad mark.

FCR is the most transparent way to measure whether your agents are performing up to the mark or not. If customers call back several times, or their calls are being transferred to different levels, then this is a bad sign.

So make sure your agents address customers issues in the first go and provide quality solutions.

3. Customer Retention Rate

Are your customers sticking along with your brand? Or are you always in the need to find new customers because your customers aren’t loyal? CRR (customer retention rate) is the balance of your existing customer base who is sticking with your brand for a time period.

If your agents aren’t able to provide better service and solutions to your customers, then the customer retention rate will be the lowest. Make sure the CRR for your brand remains maximum. The reason behind this is that it’s too hard and expensive to attract new customers so make sure that you don’t let go of your existing ones because of bad service.

4. Call Abandonment Rate

As we have discussed before as well, customers want quick answers. If your agents keep them on hold, divert their calls to various departments or are unable to provide solutions, customers will surely get frustrated.

They will definitely not keep on waiting for too long and hang up. Call abandonment rate should be kept the least as this shows how badly customers are frustrated with your after service. Moreover, it also shows the percentage of loss of trust that a customer has build because of bad customer service.

5. Percentage of Calls Blocked

This percentage shows how many customer calls were unanswered. Unanswered because of a busy tone that the customer received. If this call centric metric tends to be too high then one should take effective action.

The reason being, the call center is losing effective business coming in. Why lose an opportunity coming in. A great way to tackle this is to implement IVR menu, Auto transfer and many other options.

Also Read:- How to improve call center agent productivity and performance

By measuring these top 5 call center metrics, one will be able to understand what are the deviations and what should be corrected. Hope this blog helps you to achieve your business goals and provide great customer satisfaction.

The post Call Center Metrics to Measure an Agent’s Productivity appeared first on Girnar Care.

For a call center employee, handling these types of calls can be a big-time thing. Obviously, it ain’t easy to handle an angry customer on the other side of the line with ease. Right from their frustration to sometimes also hearing foul language, customer service reps have heard it all.

Well, it isn’t the customer’s fault too. They have their own negative experiences after investing in your product and services. All they need is guidance and support to deal with such situations.

Sadly, this task isn’t easy as it takes a toll on the mental health of the receiver. Since your agents are the face of your organisation, they need to train in advance to deal with such situations. Right from the beginning of the call and hearing the brunt of anger till delivering a solution, it should be a smooth journey.

Also Read:- How to improve call center agent productivity and performance

This blog will be dedicated to special tips and tricks to train your employee to deal with all types of calls. So let’s get into it.

Ways to Deal with Angry Customers

The main advice before reading ahead is to train employees in a manner where they don’t take things on themselves. Taking every conversation of a distressed customer personally is not gonna help. Train agents in a way where they know the priority of every conversation is customer satisfaction.

Difficult situations and angry customers will come there way each time but your agents need to have confidence and patience to handle them. And that too with grace.

Hear them out

The first piece of advice will be to patiently hear what your customer has to say. They are angry for an XYZ reason and you know it. Train your agents beforehand to listen to everything that a customer has to say.

Letting customers speak their hearts out will calm the situation. Hearing patiently, allowing them to speak, listening to their problems and then moving forward is an ideal way.

Show Empathy

If your agents will ask the customer to stop exaggerating and overreacting, this will only worsen the situation. Rather show customers empathy and let them know that you yourself feel the customers problem. Statements like:
1. “I feel your situation, but I assure you that I will sort this out”.
2. “I know how problematic it is for you – let’s look at how can we solve this problem”.

Give them the right solutions

Keeping calm and helping the customer with the right set of solutions will ease the customer’s problem. Agents should stay focused on providing first-class solutions to the customers so that the brand trust remains intact.

After hearing the problem statement and showing empathy, one need to calmly mention a solution that could help. Likewise, giving the customer guarantee that these problems won’t repeat is an ideal way to close the conversation. A constructive solution will do it all.

Deal with your angry customers in an easy way

Customers are important and one should also take care of their satisfaction. If you are facing problems dealing with your customers, then we are here to help you out. We have resources that are trained professionally to give your customers ideal solutions which will only please them.

Likewise, it will create a better brand image and keep the customers trust intact.
Give us a call now.

The post How to Handle Stressed and Angry Customers appeared first on Girnar Care.

No matter how great your product is, if your service reps aren’t working on point, then your customer service will be questioned again. Likewise, poor customer service will damage your brand image and you’ll lose your customers too. Your employees should possess certain customer service skills to do the job.

Well, the transformation of your customer service from bad to good cannot happen overnight. It needs time and you need to make sure that your agents are working in accordance each day.

Commitment, grasping change, readiness and the art of understanding customer emotions will definitely change your customer service. In order to change it, you need to understand what exactly is customer service? Why is it important and what one should do to achieve it.

Defining Customer Service

Customer service is something that a brand provides to its new and existing set of customers. There are employees specifically working in a particular department curated to provide a good experience to the customers. What service reps basically do is answer the queries of the distressed callers through various channels. Channels like Phone calls, Email, Chat, Messages, Social media etc.

The act of timely providing help and assisting (through any medium) a stressed customer is called Customer Service. These customer service reps possess a certain set of customer service skills set which help them to work.

Moreover, these skills set them apart and help them to maintain healthy customer relationships.

Why are these skills important?

Let’s look at the statistics.
If your customers face one single negative experience during their pre-purchase and post-purchase journey, 51% of them are not likely to return. In other words, a single bad experience can ruin customer experience and force one not to return to do business

Similarly, If a customer has a positive experience with a brand, he will definitely return and also suggest it to his friends and family.

“Today’s consumers do not buy just products or services — more and more, their purchase decisions revolve around buying into an idea and an experience.”

Mickensy

Now that’s evident enough that great customer service will reap many benefits. Now let’s focus on what traits your service reps should possess to offer a great customer experience.

Customer service skills

These 6 skills stand mandatory for all service reps to have ideal conversations with distressed customers. Your agents need to be through with these skills & follow a customer-centric approach to provide excellent service. Your role as an entrepreneur is to train and monitor all your agents so that you could not find further deviations.

Also Read:- Call Center Agent Burnout Intensified during a Crisis

Moreover, your customers will be the happiest and will not even think twice before returning.

By working on your strategy, you can create a positive, hassle-free, best in class experience for your customer.

The post Customer service skills and why do your agents need them appeared first on Girnar Care.

Customers call a service call center when they feel lost or have complaints about the products/services they bought. But most of the time, they get frustrated with calls put on hold or longer call durations. The longer a customer calls in put on hold, the more frustrated they get. In other words, the chance of losing potential customers becomes high.

This blog will provide some tips that help to reduce hold time when customers need your help

Well, according to statistics, 60% out of 2500 consumers believe that putting a call on hold for more than 1 minute is too long. Likewise, 32.3% of consumers believe that call center agents should answer calls immediately without putting calls on hold. Thus, reduce hold time stands to be a major plus for call center companies.

Reduce hold time: Know how you can do it

It doesn’t really matter for customer’s to immediately change brands. Brands that make them feel good about their purchase will always be a customer’s choice. No matter how good your brand’s put on hold music is, your business is at great risk of losing customers.

So how can you deal with such a problem? Don’t worry we are here to help you out.

With a traditional phone system, there is nothing much you can do. You cannot equip it with great technology that serves your customer well. Even if you could do that, it would cost you a fortune. Well, in this case, Girnar Care’s cloud-based smart solutions are here to help you out. With Cloud solutions, you equip yourself with a magnitude of ways to reduce call time. Let’s look deep into it.

Number one solution is IVR

Yes, you got it right. Interactive voice recognition is a great way to reduce your call hold time.
With this, you allow your customers to seamlessly solve their own problems without the involvement of an agent. A customer will call you, follow the recorded steps, select his options, feed input and voila he solves his own problem. This ensures there are no calls put on hold. In situations where there is an urgent need to speak to a human agent, IVR directs your call to the desired agents without frustrating the customer.

Read more:- How can IVR benefit your business

Self-help chat options

So a customer doesn’t have enough time to make a call to get a solution, he can simply connect with a chatbot. Yes, chatbots are a great way to communicate with your customers in a fuss-free manner. Chatbots are available on your website and a customer can visit them to connect to you.

Chatbots have pre-written answers to questions that most customers ask. So this saves your agent’s time too. Your agents can now free themselves to answer monotonous questions and rather work on more important ones. Want to know more about chatbots, then click.

Call history availability to reduce hold time

So callers often get irritated when they get connected to an agent who cannot solve their problem. The next thing that happens is the call gets routed to another agent. Meanwhile, the customer gets irritated explaining their problem to almost every agent his call connects to.

So with the long call-hold time and explaining details, every time frustrates the customer. Indirectly, increasing the chances of losing a customer to a bad customer experience. With Girnar care’s cloud telephony dashboard, you can reduce this frustration. Each time a call comes in, this dashboard store the call recording and details of the call.

The details include the problem, solution offered and other important call inputs. So the next time the same customer calls, the dashboard shows the call history. The agent then can read all the call history and then communicate with the customer. The customer on the other hand doesn’t have to reexplain everything. This also leaves a good mark on the customer as he believes that the brand cares for him and knows his history.

The bottom line

Cloud telephony solutions have so much more to offer you and your business. From seamless communication, great customer experience, easy to use technology to cost-saving, less agent burnout and much more, all this is possible with cloud telephony.

Call us now and we’ll help you to access technologies that can help you to increase your brand value and offer a great customer experience.

The post Tips to Reduce Hold Time in Your Call Center appeared first on Girnar Care.