Call Center Challenges: 5 Challenges Faced in a Call Center Environment

Challenges are ideas that turn into milestones when accepted in favorable time and space and they can only be seen as promising prospects if our preparedness matches the intensity of the challenges.

Despite the fact that the call volume is increasing exponentially day by day, call centers have evolved through tough circumstances and have assured efficient customer satisfaction with the utilization of the available tools like call center software, predictive dialer, VoIP calls, virtual call center, and much more.

Let’s look at the 5 call center challenges and understand how they can be overcome.

1. Call Volume Demands: Needs an Efficient Response

New businesses and entrepreneurial ventures are increasing in numbers every day. With such growth, call volume demand is growing exponentially. The aggressive growth in the online market and customers doing their monetary transactions through online platforms have made it tough to meet such alarming growth.

Most of the customers speak to the agents before reaching their final decisions and in this process, lots of inbound and outbound calls are made. The marketing activities behind closing a sale have a crucial role too and for the same very reason, customers are reached out by the agents, perpetually.

This growth in call volume should be parallel with our efficiency as it should grow with the increasing demand.

To tackle such circumstances, it is necessary to understand country-wise peak time and traffic. Once you get hold of these patterns, you can deploy your agents accordingly and ensure a far better response to increasing call volume demands.

We should understand that the call volume demand gives avenues to use the available resources to its best level and make use of contemporary technologies to keep the call center environment ready for anything upcoming.

2. Call Center Management: Needs a Wider Perspective

There are many aspects that cumulatively decide the environment at the call center. Agent engagement and operational cost have a major role to play when it comes to call center management.

So optimization of workforce and cost will help you ensure better results. Now, if we consider the management at the call center then go for the most contemporary technologies. The easiest way to set up and operate a call center is if you host it on the cloud. Adopting a cloud-based technology suits best for the call center needs as cloud technology is efficient as well as economical.

In a call center that is hosted on the cloud, agents work independently irrespective of location and time, and thus hosted call center environment also ensures greater productivity.

3. First Call Resolution: Well-Informed Agents

At the end of the day, the number of calls that end up on a convincing note does matter a lot. Now a customer who is seeking information looks for an apt solution in the least time invested. And this investment of time depends on the fact of how efficient the agent is. But the challenge of first call resolution should not be left to just one person, rather, there should be a team that is capable of handling any customer query at any time.

The reason behind it is simple, expertise in specific areas is mostly dependent on the individual’s interests and capabilities. A certain agent may be good with numbers and another can be good with words – these are specific characteristics. In the same manner, different people in the team should be trained in various areas that relate to customer’s interests and inclinations. This will ensure, that every problem gets tackled in the best possible manner because the presence of a proper communication channel that could join agents with the experts will prove to be very effective. And with this exercise, the possibility of first-call resolution will definitely get higher.

4. Customer Relationship Management: Staying Ahead of the Times

Call centers are the toughest work environments, there is no doubt about it. The reason is the never-ending expectation of providing customers with better satisfaction and also maintaining good customer relationships.

Deployment of the right agent to the right customer is one of the most important tasks to be thought over by the call center managers. But before all that, the recruitment of the right set of people as agents is the most necessary thing. Proper training and occasional grooming are also necessary. This ensures better agent involvement.

5. Employee Attrition: Understand your Agents Better

Employee attrition is a signal that something better is being sought after by the employees and what they are looking for is not present in their current organization. All the efforts behind hiring and training of agents go in vain if they switch very soon. It adds to the loss of the company. Work pressure, better opportunities, or a comprehensive gap between the skill sets of the agent and the work leads to attrition.

The solution thus lies in focusing on the individuals and leveraging the whole situation towards a healthier scenario. This can only be done by understanding the agents and their needs and taking steps to fulfill those needs.

There should be a proper medium for the development of the skills and personality of the agents. This helps agents to handle the customers in a more efficient manner.

The Road Ahead

Every big challenge has a hidden benefit in it. And this comes to the surface while tackling it with a good plan and strategy. This stands true for the scenario of call centers as well. A call center is not just a medium between customers and agents, but call centers provide a whole lot of possibilities that exist in the market. To tap these possibilities, the use of the best contemporary technologies such as the cloud is one big step ahead, and a hosted call center is well thought over and well-worked solution for the above-mentioned challenges.

This article is written by Rohan Singh. He is a Digital Marketer at Call Center Hosting. Technology became his love since the day he used his first computer. Rohan also loves to read on history, psychology, literature, and philosophy. Sometimes when lying alone in the dark, he contemplates on the meaning of life and secrets of universe and fails miserably at finding answers. Follow him: Twitter | Facebook.