The BPO outsourcing industry has been in quite a boom now. It has always had a crucial role in helping all the other sectors maintain a great transition from offline to online operation during the Coronavirus pandemic. Customer support outsourcing is the most important service that most brands opt to stay afloat in the competition. However, certain golden rules are still imperative for brands and BPO call centers to know about and implement. This will ensure maximum results in the target market.
So, we are here to talk more about the golden rules that no one should miss!
Don’t Forget to Invest in Your Agents
Do you have a competitive pay scale, a proper incentive system, a positive work culture, and career progression opportunities?
All of your potential job perks must meet or exceed industry standards, and they must be clearly explained at the time of onboarding. This will ensure that your new hires and existing employees work towards a uniform goal with everything they have got.
When it comes to onboarding the right applicant, many obstacles come along the way. Approximately 73% of employers face difficulty finding qualified expert applicants. The next part of the screening process is to ensure that each customer support outsourcing candidate has the needed skill set.
Here are some parameters to think about while employing future agents:
- Experience: All applicants must have the fundamental skills and experience you are looking for. This includes technical and soft skills and the ability to learn on the job.
- Language: During the interview phase, assess their language abilities. Don’t put all your faith in certifications.
- Job Tenure: Check their past job tenure to see how many times they have changed jobs over their career. Avoid hiring agents who have changed jobs very frequently.
- Work Attitude: Assess their attitude towards challenging obstacles in the past and how they overcame them. Did they have a cheerful demeanor? Soft skills are crucial for achieving high levels of customer satisfaction.
Have a Positive Work Culture
Despite technological advancements, the focus is still on client happiness. So how can you get your employees to work harder to boost client satisfaction? It all ends at how well you manage your team.
First and foremost, you must accurately anticipate your call volumes. Forecasting entails calculating future call volumes, which can be done in Excel or with the help of software such as:
- Analyzing historical data to make a year-by-year projection
- Observing seasonal patterns
- Observing patterns daily
To foster a healthy culture, you must also find and hire skilled and seasoned managers who aim to promote stability, transparency, continuity, consistency, and quality.
As previously stated, a pay-for-performance compensation scheme for your telecom customer service outsourcing is only helpful if it corresponds with the company’s financial and business objectives. Employee retention and greater productivity and additional income generation for your firm are dependent on the potential for agents to earn more compensation based on their performance.
When you use an incentive program to recognize top performers, you are laying the groundwork for a positive workplace culture that encourages healthy competition among employees. This is good for the success of themselves, their teams, and the organization as a whole.
Prioritize the Turn-around Time
Regardless of how complex today’s tools and processes are, it ultimately boils down to client happiness. From the standpoint of the call center for energy services or any other sector, your KPIs are crucial. It is believed that if management takes a proactive approach to increasing optimization and efficiency, whether using customer tools in your own environment, you will be successful.
Here are the fundamental indicators we believe will always be important in your call center:
- Average speed to answer (ASA): Achieving this KPI requires careful workforce management, accurate forecasting, and the reduction of absenteeism.
- Average handling time (AHT): Proper agent training, floor leadership, and quality management are all important in reducing overall AHT. This is done by ensuring high levels of customer satisfaction by reducing overall AHT through faster initial call resolution and/or establishing baseline AHT.
- FCR (First-call Resolution): This KPI, along with the other two mentioned above, is essential for establishing and sustaining consistently high levels of customer satisfaction. When agents are held more accountable for FCR than AHT, especially when AHT caps are in place, the trap that must be avoided is that they will stay on the phone longer to handle the issue when they should be escalating to Level 2 needed.
Achieving a satisfactory balance between FCR and AHT requires proper training and coaching.
Final Words
Following these golden rules for call center and customer support outsourcing ensures maximum effectiveness for brands of any sector. Moreover, it drives results like nothing else because it is only the customers who make or break a brand at the end of the day.
So, irrespective of whether you are looking for customer support outsourcing or marketing and lead generation, these golden rules can help you scale your business and target new locations and audiences.
