Unpredictable Customer
Traffic-Top Most Challenge of a Contact Center
About 48% of the companies that have adopted the contact center technology believe that unpredictable customer traffic is one of the top most chal enges they have to face. While it may be high on some days, it could be incredibly low the other days. The customer traffic can even differ according to the days of the week and also the timings of the day.
Although it is difficult to predict this customer traffic, contact centers should be able to organize their resources in order to attend all the cal s in a satisfactory manner, without any delays.
Cal centers are mostly cost centers and their success depends on how wel they reduce these costs. The performance wil be low, be it an overstaffed cal center and an understaffed cal center. It is therefore important to analyze the customer traffic over time, find out the day of the week and the time of the day where the cal traffic is high and then hire accordingly. Most employees in cal centers work on shifts, which is a good thing. Accurate planning can help the managers strike the right balance between handling customer cal s and reducing the overheads of the cal center.
How to handle unpredictable customer traffic in call centers?
If customer traffic could be accurately predicted, cal centers would never have to face any chal enges at all. However, although you can have a rough idea, this cannot be predicted accurately in reality.
Fol owing a few tips given below can help cal centers to become capable of handling this unpredictable customer traffic:
During peak hours it often becomes unavoidable to put the customers in queue. It should be understood that today’s customers hate to wait and wil most likely abandon the cal if they are made to wait for too long. At such times, it is better to put some rules in place. For instance, the waiting time has to be reduced to 20 seconds. If the cal cannot be answered within this time, there could be a system where the agent cal s back the customer. Also, the average time that is needed to attend a cal can be cut down during these peak hours so that each agent wil be able to handle more customers.
If the cal centers are able to analyze the day of the week during which the cal traffic may be higher, they wil be in a better position to handle customers. This can be made possible by reducing the absenteeism on that particular day or by adding in another batch of staff for that day.
By rewarding the agents who appear at work on that day, cal centers can motivate their employees to handle customers efficiently.
If the peak timings of each day can be determined, cal centers can take measures to cut down the breaks during those hours in order to handle the traffic.
Measures should be taken to increase the loyalty of customers. This includes hiring agents with good communication skil s, reducing the cal -waiting times and improving the customer experience.
Having an intel igent IVR system in place can lower the burden during peak hours. Its ability to route the cal to the right agent with appropriate skil s can definitely save the time of both the customer and the agents.
Customer service is the key to survival for contact centers today. It is important for the agents of every contact center to work towards enhancing the customer experience, even when they are handling peak traffic cal s.