10 Common Call Center Challenges

In cases, like the senior executives from Infinit-O, they don’t regard contact center efficiency savings as a “nice to have”.

Instead, they are demanding them as standard. This view of the contact center as a “cost center” is one that restricts contact centers from providing their best possible service.

If your resources are being squeezed, you will inevitably need to lose your headcount. And if you’re going to do that, you need to reduce call demand to counterbalance it.

The secret to this is to create a mechanism that identifies the reasons people ring the call center. By doing this, you can start fixing some of the problems at the source and reducing demand that way.

• Predictive diallers

• CRM databases and workforce management (WFM) tools

• Sales order processing platforms

• Credit card security applications

• Automated voice response systems

The problem is that contact centers such as Office Partners 360 struggle to keep up. They have difficulties identifying which channels they should focus on and which technology is best to implement. And when new technology is installed, it is often not linked to other systems.

In terms of implementing new technology to support new channels, we recommend first is to determine what you need in the short and long term. It is good to separate the “must-have” and the “nice to have” features.

Once this initial analysis has been done, we follow up with a new recommendation. Check that the new systems will integrate with the old. Or better, choose us as your vendor. We guarantee to consolidate its technology.

For example, one their priority is to increase customer satisfaction, while another is to cut costs.

However, improving satisfaction can be difficult when there is little financial support from elsewhere in the business.

2.) Ask other parts of the organization for their main focuses and try to align your service with the values held in the highest regard amongst other departments. This will lead to a consistent experience.

3.) We then help eliminate those priorities that are poorly defined. We then contradict those of greatest importance and go against organizational culture.

4.) Lastly, create a plan for investments in time and money. Make sure each is linked to the most important of your business priorities.

This might not seem particularly high. But the stark reality is that a 100-seat contact center with 10% absenteeism will only have an average of 90 seats occupied at any one time.

Unsurprisingly, a shortfall of this magnitude has a huge impact on the quality of service.

This is due to fewer agents available to handle customer interactions, wait queues tend to increase and agents are put under pressure to spend less time on each call. 

This situation holds true for some of the major teams of Filta.

Over extended periods of time, absenteeism can impact staff morale and may even foster similar behavior in those left to fill the gap.

2.) Once we gather this information, we talk to your team as a group. We guarantee to appeal to their better nature, explain the effect that absenteeism has on your business and ours.

3.) It is also important for us to implement and communicate a robust absence management policy. We are clear that employees will be contacted during their absence and will need to undertake a return-to-work interview. This helps our managers understand why they were absent and how a repeat situation can be avoided.

4.) To ensure real impact, staff should be made aware that repeated unsubstantiated absence will result in formal action such as a verbal or written warning.

Moreso, there are heavy costs associated with recruiting, hiring, training, and developing new staff.

Additionally, the costs associated with the dip in productivity that is inevitable as new recruits battle to get up to speed.

For our Filipino customer service, this means being careful when it comes to recruitment. We aim for people who see call centers as a career option rather than a stop-gap.

For others, it’s all about empowerment. As a customer service company in Philippines, it’s all well and good developing people and giving them skills.

But if you don’t allow employees to maximize those skills in full, they are likely to get despondent and leave.

The key is to empower advisors. Even if it’s through small activities like giving them the freedom to authorize minor refunds.

Giving people this kind of ownership helps prevent them from feeling like a number. As a result, it makes them feel they are valued by the business, which is an incentive to stay.

• Forecasting your requirements – Are you struggling to predict your contact volumes? Is your forecast accuracy way off? This can cause great understaffing and make scheduling a big challenge.

• Planning your work schedules – Can you successfully schedule the correct number of staff to meet your needs, while ensuring that you have the right skills available?

• Managing your employees’ time – Are you prioritizing tasks to make the best use of your time, as well as that of your advisors?

The more data, in terms of historical contact volumes, the WFM team has access to, the easier this will become for them.

In terms of managing the advisors’ time, this doesn’t mean targeting them against time-based metrics like Average Handling Time (AHT) that can lead to negative behaviors. Instead, we coach advisors to use techniques that improve the customer experience, while lowering AHT naturally.

Signposting is a great example of this. For instance, in the classic scenario when an advisor says: “I’m going to give you a reference number. Have you got a pen to write it down?”, people will go on a hunt to find a pen. Yet time can be shaved off this process.

If instead, the advisor was to say at the start of the call: “I’m going to give you a reference number. It might be handy to have a pen”, the customer can rummage around as you carry on the conversation.

This is a good example of how signposting can save advisors’ time.

In an in-house environment like theirs, this can lead to frustration for both managers and front-line staff. And in the outsourcing arena, it can cause clients to question the third party’s capabilities.

A key problem in call center outsourcing Philippines is that we get stuck in routines of firefighting and fail to invest in upskilling advisors to handle the needs of modern customers.

We believe that such metrics make it much more difficult to improve key measures such as quality and adherence.

We focus instead on more relevant, customer-focused metrics.

• Net Promoter Scores (NPSs)

• Social networking comments

• Real-time customer feedback

• Balanced scorecards that all aim to match quantity with a qualitative performance aspect

In both instances, Telework PH runs the risk of their agents losing enthusiasm and becoming demoralized. In turn, it can lead to absenteeism and ultimately attrition.

• Offering a clear path of progression

• Favorable shift patterns and general recognition

In fact, just take a look at what our readers found to be the greatest keys to advisor engagement.

• Work-life balance

• Self-development / Career progression

• Fairness / Transparency

• Salary

• Atmosphere

Offering incentives is another key to engagement according to a number of our employees.

We offer traditional incentive schemes. But we change these around regularly and are always coming up with new ways to recognize our staff’s hard work and achievements.”

Furthermore, technology can also play a role.

Systems such as intelligent call routing to direct a customer to the appropriate advisor or service and automating routine tasks free staff up to focus on more complex queries.

Without management buy-in, a number of the other problems in this list become harder to solve.

Contact centers serve as a “hub” for the Voice of the Customers (VoC).

This means that it holds great feedback that can be used for your organization’s creative, marketing and production teams. It is up to you to think of ways that you can drive the VoC into these departments for real change, to highlight your contact center’s value.

• Another way we achieve management’s support in improving your performance. We present them with cost figures for absenteeism and attrition each year instead of percentage figures.

While this may seem like a small change, management will be more likely to invest in improving contact center culture. This is because they see a cost-benefit as opposed to a mere percentage benefit.

However, remember to include hidden costs of HR time and so forth in your calculations.

The problem is that HGS are inherently flat structures. Their career prospects are often limited, as there are many more advisor roles than leader or manager positions.

The impact is clear. Organizations like them risk losing their best people if they cannot provide adequate career opportunities. Talented staff might also become demotivated and stop working to the same high standards they achieved previously.

Be realistic. If you don’t see opportunities arising in the short term, you have to manage the person’s expectations.

However, do look at where else you can involve and engage in the business. for example, giving them responsibility for overseeing a new project where the skills they’ll gain will be useful for a future management position.

Magellan Solutions makes sure that your team will not be left idling.

We think of ways to keep them going with new tasks for them to see that we want them to grow along with our partnership.