How to Avoid Mistakes While Setting up a Call Center?

When setting up a call center for your business, you mustn’t make mistakes. This is because these mistakes can cause you to deliver poor customer service to your clients. While some mistakes are inevitable, others can be avoided easily. Below are some of the steps you can take to avoid mistakes while setting up a call center. 

Decide on the Best Procedures to Perform Tasks

If you have different people supervising your call center operators, then they are likely to perform tasks differently. Even if a trainer is responsible for coaching them on the right procedures, it will still confuse them. That is why you need to decide on the best procedures for performing tasks. 

Alternatively, you can ask your call center operators to choose the procedures they think are the best. This will help you to avoid mistakes when setting up your call center.

Document the Approved Procedures

Deciding on the best procedures for call center operations is not enough. You also need to document these procedures and make them accessible to your operators. These documented procedures can be in the form of guides, scripts, or articles. 

 When you document these procedures, they will look more simple, and understanding the process will be easy. In addition, it will help your operators to perform tasks according to the documented procedures perfectly. However, this doesn’t mean you should dictate every word your call center operators should speak during calls. 

Inform your Operators Whenever you Update the Procedures

Change is constant and even the littlest modification to your documented procedures can make a huge impact. To avoid mistakes in your call center setup, you need to inform your operators about new changes made to documented procedures.

 Besides informing your call center operators about these new changes, you are to ensure that they understand them. One of the ways you can do that is by organizing training and quizzes based on the latest changes you have made. 

Ask

your Operators to Practice Using your Procedures

When your operators practice using your procedures frequently, they are bound to become perfect. However, this won’t stop them from making mistakes, but it will be less frequent. This is because a lot of people have problems with obeying instructions to the latter, especially when performing many tasks. 

One of the ways you can avoid mistakes is to ask your operators to practice using your procedures during training. In addition, you should ensure that they can complete a call with customers without making mistakes. 

Use the Best Software

There is a lot of modern software that can help your agents make calls without mistakes. However, you need to ensure that the software you are using for your call center is effective. If the software is preventing your agents from carrying out tasks perfectly, then you need to change it. 

This is because the best software must be easy to use. In addition, it should provide your agents with whatever information they need. Also, it should allow you to create and update procedures whenever you want to.

Thing Call Center Agents Do that Customers Hate

To endear your customers to your business, you need to inform your call center agents to reduce these actions. Although some are not avoidable sometimes, reducing them will improve your customer relationship. 

Placing Customers on Hold

Customers become irritated when they are kept on hold for over a minute. They might even hang up and decide not to call again. This little mistake can become a huge problem for your business if that customer is a first-time caller. 

To avoid this mistake, you need to ensure your agents do not place customers on hold for long. Where the issue is going to take a while to resolve, your agent is to keep your customer informed. This will make them be more patient as they wait for your agent to resolve the issue.

Transferring the Customer to Another Operator

Transferring your customers from one operator to another will cause them to become frustrated with your services. This is because customers have no option but to recount their problem all over again when talking to a new operator. When this happens, resolving the issues will take more time than required. To prevent this from happening, you need to ensure customers are transferred to an agent capable of resolving the issue. 

Not Displaying Emotional Support

When customers are explaining their problems, they expect your call center agents to listen and understand. If they feel your operators are not providing the needed emotional support, they will get angry and switch to another company. This is why you must train your call center agents on how to provide emotional support to customers. In addition, they should answer customers’ requests immediately.

Not Responding on Time

Regardless of the communication channel, customers do not like even the tiniest bit of delay. If your agents are taking too long to respond, your customers might switch to companies with better customer service. One of the ways you can avoid this is by asking your agents to respond immediately. In addition, use call center software to track their performance and know the common mistakes they make. Besides ensuring that exceptional customer service is being offered, rewarding the best-performing agent will be easy. 

Collecting Wrong Payment Information from Customers

You need to train your operators on how to collect payment information from customers. When doing that, you should ensure they are aware of the consequences of behaving contrary to the rules. To ensure they obey the rules, you can provide a procedure they can follow when making calls. 

Conclusion

If you want to deliver excellent customer service in your business, there are certain mistakes you must avoid. One of such mistakes is hiring untrained or unprofessional calk center agents. By reading this article, you have known the right steps to take to ensure that mistakes are avoided. Finally, you can reach out to aircall.io to help out.