Category: Insights

The customer should always be the primary focus of a call center. Be it an inbound, outbound, or even hybrid model, all businesses in the Contact Center industry should put CX first and everything else second to third. This is not new information in the industry and the idea of a customer-centric call center has been around since the early 2010s. So how come there are still plenty of call centers out there struggling to provide decent CX? The answer to that is quite simple: priorities. While everybody says they’re focusing on customer satisfaction and customer experience, most are actually prioritizing sales. And why is it wrong to want my company to be profitable you ask? It’s not wrong, it’s just not future-proof, and those profits you keep focusing on by ignoring vital CX aspects could cost you in the long run. DOWNLOAD THE FREE E-BOOK HERE So, let’s take a good look at what it really means to adopt a customer-centric approach and why monetizing should be placed second on your list of priorities. A Customer-Centric Call Center Starts with Rethinking Your Agent Workflow Most call centers believe they are putting the customer first by building complex marketing tactics and including key conversational triggers in their scripts. Here at Example Call Center we always put the customer first by reducing waiting times and promising first call resolutions. Well, Example Call Center, you are but you also aren’t. To build an efficient Customer-Centric Call Center you need to take a new approach when building call agent workflows. For one, you need to take into account that first call resolutions and a call quota are one of the main things that are dethroning customer satisfaction in favor of profitability.` You can’t build a profitable future-proof call center without a sturdy telecom service. Check out our Voice Carrier Network Services for Call Centers and see how we can help you improve your business! At the End of the Day, the Agent Wants and Needs to Respect Their Workflow If the main priority of your agents is to take/make a certain number of calls in a day, they will focus all their energy on meeting their quota and keeping all conversations short and simple. This means superficially listening to the customer, hurrying up to end the call, not understanding the entire problem, and generating customer frustration. And it’s a normal thing to happen because, at the end of the day, the agent wants to meet their quota. It’s an understandable thing to happen. Call center agents are subjected to a lot of restrictions and a generally higher level of supervision and stricter quotas than many other jobs. And it’s almost impossible for anyone to go out of their way to meet quotas and offer client satisfaction. Somewhere along the way, one of the two is being sacrificed. Unfortunately, it’s usually the latter. So, the first step to building a customer-centric call center is to adapt your agent workflow to your new company focus, leaving quotas and other tactics on the back burner for a while. The Next Vital Step Is Making Sure Your Agents Have Soft Skills While there are industry leaders that have claimed and proven that you can teach agents soft skills, having agents with innate soft skills is the best way to go. In both outbound and inbound scenarios, customer satisfaction is generated by a soft-spoken, attentive, patient, empathic agent. There’s no room for anything else. That’s why making sure your agents receive regular sensitivity training is crucial when designing a new and improved customer experience. You can learn more about the importance of teaching soft skills to agents by reading our free e-book. Just fill in the form at the bottom of the article to get your free copy now! All Your Efforts Are in Vain If You’re Not Using a Good Voice Solution Until now we’ve looked at the human part of building a customer-centric call center. However, there’s another secret ingredient that can make or break your plan – the quality of your calls. No matter how genuinely involved and empathic your agents are when interacting with customers, they will still decide to opt for better voice services if the calls drop or are interrupted. You need to make quality calls through and through to really claim that you’re running a customer-centric business. And you can’t find better quality than with a company that is a Carrier of Carriers with a telecom service purposely built for call centers. With NobelBiz’s VOICE CARRIER NETWORK we can guarantee you tier 1 traffic, no dropped calls, no interruptions, and better answer rates. All of this for the lowest price in the industry. Learn more about our telecom services! Building a Customer-Centric Call Center Means Understanding Client Needs Here at NobelBiz we usually make promises that we can keep. So much so that most of our customers were happy to provide us with enough feedback for a survey. We took all that data and put in an engaging and complete guide on how to build an experience center – according to a company that managed to do it! Use the form below to download our e-book and start building a customer-focused experience center today so you can drive company growth tomorrow.