The COVID-19 pandemic has been tough for businesses in every country. Businesses have had to make changes and adapt, which has naturally impacted their customer service. For example, many businesses have been unable to provide the same quality of customer service due to reduced staff numbers, or financial problems that have meant losing access to key resources.

As a call center, it’s highly likely that the pandemic has impacted your daily operations, too – which has no doubt affected your customer communications. If this is the case, don’t worry – it’s still possible to provide excellent customer service during these times – it just requires more planning and continued hard work. Contact center outsourcing to the Philippines could also be a great option. By taking time to research and communicate with your target BPO company, you’ll be sure that they’ll be able to represent your brand and provide excellent service to your customers.

Here’s a short guide on how you can do this.

Optimize call center analytics

Aceyus call center analytics software can help businesses improve the customer journey. Through doing this, your customer service levels will reach gold-standard.

Call center analytics provide you with big data surrounding a variety of factors, from customer experience scores to how well each individual employee is performing on the job – meaning you can gain an understanding of who your best and worst employees are. This is valuable data, as it allows you to make strong improvements in weak areas.

Every month (or couple of months, depending on your preference), you will be able to hold employee performance reviews that are backed up by hard evidence. Employees will then know exactly what they need to do to better their performance and leave customers satisfied.

Create a culture of positivity and empathy

The best call centers have workplace cultures in which management staff and employees follow the same values and principles. You should be aiming to focus on positivity and empathy; which are incredibly important values to have in the work culture.

When in a call with your employees, customers do not want to feel like they are not cared for – or are talking to someone who has no invested interest in truly helping them. By promoting positivity and empathy in your training and daily operations, your employees will be able to provide customer service that is rooted in understanding the customer and providing them an experience that leaves them feeling satisfied.

Focus on building relationships with customers

Building strong, personal relationships with customers is easily achievable in call centers. Here are some of the ways you can do it:

• Always address customers by name
• Assign specific employees to individual customers for repeat calls – this will build familiarity and understanding (customers don’t want to speak to a different agent every time they have a problem)
• Build detailed databases for each individual customer that cover a customer’s history, from past experiences to complaints
• Conduct follow-up calls to check on customers and see if there are any new issues

Transfer customers to colleagues and supervisors when required

Even the best call center agents don’t know it all. When this is the case and an employee is struggling to solve a customer query, they need to transfer the call to the right colleague or supervisor for the job. This will impress the customer, as they will see you care about providing excellent customer service. Furthermore, even supervisors might not be effective in delivering customer needs, hence supervisors should also be trained in their respective fields (look up https://www.challengerinc.com/effortless-experience/coaching-for-supervisors/ to know more about supervisor coaching) so that they can provide consistent solutions as well as give effective coaching to the front-line representatives.

Also, it’s important during your training process that employees are taught how to correctly divert calls. Also, employees should form relationships strong working relationships with one another, as this will allow them to understand who is most knowledgeable in specific areas.