Overcoming 5 Common Contact Center Challenges

Call centers play a vital role in ensuring customer satisfaction by handling grievances, finding solutions, and providing assistance. However, running a successful call center comes with its own set of challenges, particularly in the area of outsourcing. Common Contact Center Challenges, such as increased costs and high agent turnover, can easily escalate in a fast-paced work environment.

Knowledge Management (KM) proves to be an effective solution to these problems, by lowering costs and reducing agent turnover.

Let’s understand five of the most familiar call center hassles the employees and management face, and learn the solutions to solve them.

Challenges faced by call centers

Here are some Contact Center Challenges.

1. Agent turnover

A call center is always fast-paced and people are under tremendous pressure. They are always loaded with work, even at the wee hours of the night. At times, customers are unnecessarily rude to them and they have to put on their kindest behavior to deal with them.

All of this can be extremely tiring. Agents working there see it as a difficult work environment and wouldn’t want to stay there for a long time as they might experience burnout.

2. Poor customer experience

Solving customer grievances can be a difficult task and so can be delivering quick service. As a result, the customer experience can get affected. This is one of the most common contact center challenges, one that’s quite tricky to overcome.

Low customer satisfaction ratings are never a good sign as they may lead to eventual loss of customers and bad publicity about your business.

This means new customers might also think twice before approaching you or worse, they may not use your brand at all.

3. Tool complications

Customer service agents at contact centers have to use several tools and technologies regularly. This can be time-consuming and complicated at times. Every employee must learn how to use the software to ensure a smooth experience. But sometimes, the tools are outdated or may cost a fortune.

There might be different systems for distinct tasks, making agents confused while solving a customer query. All this leads to a massive drop in the customer experience offered by the team.

4. Low performance

All the factors mentioned above affect the productivity and performance of the agents. Therefore you must carry out practices to boost their efficiency and drive them towards high-end goals. For that, you must make use of devices like KM systems to reduce the burden on the shoulders of the agents and help them grow rapidly.

5. Lost information

As agents use multiple devices, information may get lost in the sea of content. This leads to more chaos and delays, making the life of agents extremely difficult. If a customer asks, they must know where every solution rests. Besides, agents may also get briefed with too much information and make errors in remembering it.

With customers, they may fumble or give out wrong assistance. This will lead to poor customer experience and a bad reputation for the brand.

How does Knowledge Management solve these problems?

Knowledge management is the perfect solution to all these problems. It helps organize information in a systematic manner that’s easy to comprehend and access. In the following ways, it tackles the problems mentioned above:

1. Increases productivity

When a KM system organizes data, it makes the life of its users simpler. With everything organized clearly and after receiving some level of training, finding and providing information becomes easier for the agents. Allotting work as well as following protocols also becomes less complicated. Plus it saves a lot of time and energy, allowing customer service agents to work on other important things.

2. Reduces burnout

An efficient internal knowledge base simplifies everyday tasks. Additionally, it helps deflect calls to self-service channels helping call center staff focus on more pressing issues that only require human attention and problem-solving. This helps employees not overwork themselves and also enables them to feel more satisfied with their work.

All of this plays a role in reducing burnout, and thereby lowers the agent turnover rate.

3. Enhances customer experience

Customer experience is the most important aspect of the call center. Everything the place does is to improve its customer service and KM can be a game-changer here. From the organization’s knowledge base to FAQs, it can be an agent’s holy grail as well as help with self-service.

4. Increases convenience

Call centers are known for their tiring work hours and never-ending tasks. But with a good KM system that offers live chat support or ticket deflection system can respectively make things less taxing for the agents, consumers, & management. This increases the convenience of work and enables faster, better results.

With predefined information and processes, agents are ready to face different situations with confidence.

5. Organizes information

With KM, accessing information has become a lot easier for employers and employees alike. call center agents can go through information quicker due to its easy-to-read format and distinguished categories. Information overload can be avoided as everyone only knows what they are supposed to.

In case of lack of clarity, one can always refer to the information before them and get out of tricky situations with ease. For managers, explaining work and training younger officials becomes easier.

Summary

Knowledge management is here to save the day. No matter what major concern is bothering employers and employees of the contact center, advanced KM systems are making it look easy. Get yourself a knowledge base software and notice how vast a difference it can make in the workspace at your call center.