The 3 Building Blocks Of Quality Customer Support, Part 2
#3. Effective management
Not surprisingly, we already mentioned the role of management. Any team of great customer service reps would fail if management is not well-prepared and flexible enough. Here are a few examples of what management should be aware of and some best practices they should be applying in their work:
Forecasting and Staffing
If the management team underestimates the importance of the forecasted volumes of calls provided by the vendor, this usually results in understaffing. Of course a forecast is no guarantee for what is going to happen in reality, but it’s a good starting point for being better prepared for meeting the volumes of customer calls, e-mails and chat requests.
Dealing with Overcapacity
Additionally, management can use home-based agents as a back-up for peak-volume periods. If you use an internal call center, it might be also useful to you to consider redirecting some of the traffic during times of overcapacity to an external center. This way you don’t need to develop that extra flexibility in terms of staffing, but you simply rely on the support of a professional team with lots of experience in doing this.
Assigning Work Tasks
Assigning different types of work at different times of the day is also important. Most e-mail SLAs are longer than those for calls, thus during peak hours it is helpful to consider having your team off e-mails and entirely on calls. E-mails can always be answered during less busy hours of the day, as a substitute to having reps picking their nose while waiting for calls in idle mode, for example. : )
The Risks of Goals Being Improperly Communicated
The way management communicates team goals is also important. If you put too much stress on achieving targets – it all becomes a numbers game. You risk having agents misunderstand their real goal (keeping customers and clients satisfied) and start solely chasing numbers instead. This is dangerous and here are a few examples why, that I’ve encountered during my practice. At different centers I’ve seen agents hanging up right after they’ve picked up the phone in order to make their number-of-calls-taken target, get rid of the queue of waiting calls and meet the SLA. Other centers’ management understands the call duration target as a tool that helps reduce phone bills – shorter calls, smaller bills. Obviously similar approaches take quality out of the equation, but quality of service is what makes clients return and purchase again, right? Always communicate team and personal goals clearly. Let everybody be clear about their own contribution and purpose. Alternatively, choose to work with a contact center that does that.
Summary
It’s time to sum up. What would help you really improve your customer support so that it helps solve your customers’ and clients’ issues, is your understanding that KPIs and SLAs met are not the recipe for quality support. Quality support is the RESULT of your team’s attitude, your team culture and the quality of management practices. Once you improve these, you are going to be meeting your KPIs and SLAs every single day. Guaranteed! So structure your processes properly to avoid losing valuable customers and clients!
Share your comments with us! What are the building blocks of your customer support function? If you prefer to get in touch privately, feel free to shoot our Business Development Executive an e-mail or use the contacts form at our website:
http://customercarebg.com/contact-us/
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*KPI – Key Performance Indicator – statistics that help the analysis and monitoring of results and allow immediate changes, when the need arises. Examples of KPIs are the call duration target, first-call-resolution ratio.
**SLA – Service Level Agreement. The standard SLA in the call center industry is 80/20 (80% of the calls answered within the first 20 seconds waiting time) with the maximum waiting time target usually at 90 seconds. The SLA could also encompass additional KPIs.
Author: Yavor Popov
The 3 Building Blocks Of Quality Customer Support, Part 1