Your call center is your portal to excellent customer service and customer loyalty. It’s more than customer contacts on so many levels, and affects every aspect of your business.

Organizing Your Time with the Call Center

When answering the question “What is a call center,” a range of services and benefits are evident. Many call center management tools allow you to track and manage the time each of your agents are spending per call each day, as well as where the highest and lowest volumes are coming in. This gives you more control over your productivity and helps you know if your team could be rearranged for more efficiency. Looking at a breakdown of activities performed at your call center is also a way to evaluate if your representatives are allocating effective amounts of time to tasks like email responses, online chats and follow-up or tasks associated once the call has ended.

What Is a Call Center? A Place to Organize Tasks

What is a call center? It can also be a place where your agents learn to perform their job better. Allow knowledge modules and other tools to be part of your agents’ call center tasks. It doesn’t take a huge commitment to help your team feel more empowered and ready to reach new goals – try implementing a series of short modules, even ten to 15 minutes long. If the modules are ready, your agents are ready when call volumes are slower.

A call center can also be organized by level of task priority, much like a checklist. When your management gets involved in prioritizing your call center tasks, one key result is that your team feels more equipped and satisfied with their progress. There’s a deeper reason to use your call center as a place for organizing customer service tasks:  evaluating the details of call center experiences.

A Call Center is Your “Welcome” Sign

Since your call center serves as the doorway to your customer and your welcome mat, essentially, you need to know every aspect of your calls and whether or not they followed the procedures you’ve set in place. You also want your team members to feel they are part of your organization’s overall effort to create satisfied, loyal customers, and being able to use your call center as your information source so that you can make specific and purposeful recommendations is important.

One In, One Out

Use your call center as a way to actively respond to each customer contact. For every online chat, call in, concern, order request or customer question, some effort should come forth from your call center in response. You may want to consider automated out-bound customer service calls that are set to show the customer some appreciation and also to take information from the customer regarding ways to keep them coming back. It may sound like a tall order for an automated “agent,” but many organizations have seen success with this tool because customers want to be able to provide feedback.

What Is a Call Center? It’s Also A Detective

Use your call center as a sleuth—make sure the dialogue with your agents includes some form of survey. The best surveys, of course, are short, specific, and tell the customer why you’re looking for that information. The survey should not be at the beginning of the call center contact, but at the end, so that the customer can decline without compromising the purpose of their call.

Your Call Center is Many Things – With the Same Ultimate Result

Your call center is a clearinghouse for organizing customer-related tasks. It’s an avenue for training and motivating your agents and drawing on their skills. Call centers should also be a customer feedback goldmine. Every note, comment, suggestion or compliment should be tracked to help you reach your most important goal – continually pleased customers.