Building an effective call center culture will enable the organization to increase employee satisfaction while delivering an exceptional customer experience.
Delivering an exceptional customer experience has yielded exceptional results to organizations across various industries. In fact, as per “The Global State of XM, 2020” report, 89% of organizations with “significantly above average” customer experience perform better financially than their competitors. However, providing a great experience is not.
With COVID-19 leaving organizations little time to transition to a remote workforce, there were a lot of tradeoffs when taking customer experience into account. For call centers, transitioning an entire workforce to continuously resolve queries in such a high-peak time was a tremendous task. It resulted in many call center agents across the globe receiving an unprecedented volume of calls around the clock, increasing significant levels of stress. Additionally, the continuously changing nature of customer expectations, unsteady work-life balance and threats from angry customers only elevated their frustration levels. Thus, it is crucial that organizations should take special care and give their employees the required attention to creating an effective call center environment. This will not only increase their retention rate of employees but will also enable organizations to ensure they provide an excellent customer experience at every interaction.
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Here are five strategies that customer experience and customer success leaders should incorporate to build an effective call center culture:
- Hire the right people
Creating a thriving call center culture begins with hiring the right people that are passionate advocates of the brand. Organizations should employ candidates who showcase a passion for the products or services they sell. They should seek candidates who gain deep satisfaction and gratitude from helping others.
After hiring them, they should conduct training sessions that make it easy for them to learn and improve on the job. Moreover, organizations should deploy tools/technology that enables them to reduce cognitive load while enabling them to focus on addressing customer inquiries.
- Cultivate a caring culture
Across all levels within the organization, organizations should create a culture that emphasizes caring for customers. Executives should frequently interact with agents and, at times, listen to the calls side-by-side with agents. This will result in the leadership team of the organization turning into advocates for the voice of the brand. It will go a long way when getting the customer service agents to care about the customer if their hard and oftentimes thankless efforts get recognition and reward.
- Enact a foundation of empathy
Building a robust, effective call center begins with building a foundation of empathy where employees feel seen, understood, heard and valued. Leaders should hear the pain points of agents and understand their values and motivations. This will enable them to feel connected to the business and cultivate a strong sense of ownership. By elevating the experience of employees using this approach, brands not only will be able to improve their employee retention but will be able to empower them to deliver exceptional experiences to their customers.
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- Ease Collaboration
One of the biggest drivers towards increasing business profitability is satisfying customers. Luckily for most organizations, they have customer service professionals that are skilled and are more motivated to increase customer satisfaction. Therefore, organizations should make it easy for their employees to collaborate with teams and departments. This ease will allow them to quickly understand their customers while simultaneously resolving it. Creating a cross-functional collaboration will also be beneficial for brands for their long-term endeavors for more complex, high-value customer relationships in the current remote contact center environment.
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