Call center problems can cause a ripple effect across your whole organization. If that aspect of your business isn’t running smoothly, you may unintentionally provide your customers with a poor experience. If that happens, you could end up costing your business customers. But if you follow these solutions to common call center problems, your organization will run smoothly with minimal issues.

 

1. High Employee Turnover Leaves You Understaffed

According to the Quality Assurance and Training Connection (QATC), call centers tend to see staff turnover rates of about 30-45%. Replacing employees costs money. As Peoplekeep wrote, “some studies predict that every time a business replaces a salaried employee, it costs 6 to 9 months’ salary on average.” Unfortunately, you can’t change the high workload, burnout, and sometimes tedious work that comes with working at a call center, but there are ways to help lower your agent attrition.

How to Solve this Problem:

The best way to keep employees is by making your organization one where people want to work. With a strong work environment that prioritizes employee engagement, your team members will be less likely to leave. One way to keep up retention is to implement a strong sense of culture is by rewarding good work. Set team goals with some sort of incentive, such as a monetary bonus, for reaching them. Tools like CRMGamified offer live goal trackers, which will help make your employees excited to come to work every day.

 

2. Employee Absenteeism Makes Your Team Fall Behind

According to NICE inContact, call center employees tend to take off 8.2 days a year, compared to the general average employee’s estimated 7.4 days off a year. Lowering absenteeism is a struggle for many call center managers.

 

How to Solve this Problem:

The simplest solution is to enforce a strict attendance policy. Your team, of course, has the right to take time off. But make it clear to your employees that they must request time off a certain amount of time out. Have them submit the request in the attendance tracking tool. That way, you can compare all active requests against your employees’ schedule, ensuring that your team is never short-staffed.

 

3. Low First Call Resolution (FCR) Rates Leaves Customers Unsatisfied

It should be the goal of any call center to solve customer issues on the first call. The more times that customer has to call, the odds are that the customer will not consider it to be a positive experience. That can lead to low customer satisfaction, causing you to lose customers. 

 

How to Solve this Problem:

Your team may be stretched too thin, meaning they may not have the bandwidth to give each inquiry the attention it deserves. Ease your employees’ workload by implementing AI chatbots. The bots will be able to handle less complex customer inquiries, leaving your call center agents the time to focus on resolving more in-depth requests on the first contact.

 

4. Lack of Self-Service Options Leaves Customers Frustrated

Customers need the ability to solve some issues on their own. This is a win-win for both parties — customers can quickly find answers and call center employees can get that time back to work on more complex issues. 

 

How to Solve this Problem:

One of the best ways to implement self-service options is publishing a knowledge base on your website outlining the solutions to basic problems. Employees can point customers toward those articles, empowering them to find their own answers. 

Building an open-source knowledge base allows you to create it in-house and customize it to your liking. That means you can add articles focused on frequently asked questions as they arise, ensuring your customers always leave your interactions completely satisfied.

 

5. The Price of Poorly Integrated or Underused Software Is Adding Up

The right software tools are key to a successful call center. But the amount of call center technology needed to run a center can be overwhelming to some teams. If you aren’t able to keep up with all that software, you’ll be losing out on a real opportunity. Poorly integrating or underusing your software can negatively impact your workplace. It will end up being a completely avoidable expense. 

 

How To Solve This Problem:

The best way to solve this problem might be to just start from scratch. Strongly consider every functionality you value in your necessary solutions. Look for contact center software that either offers the features you need or seamlessly integrates with a valuable third-party tool. Take a look at our guide for top call center software as a good jumping-off point.

 

6. Uncertain of Which Call Center Analytics are the Most Valuable

 

Reporting and analytics are key to managing a thriving call center. But you need to make sure you know what to track and how to analyze the data you get. Just tracking every single metric and KPI can lead to a jumbled and messy pile of data that your team doesn’t know how to work through.

 

How To Solve This Problem:

Carefully track the analytics that will best serve your organization’s goals. Take a look at our list of call tracking metrics that matter in 2021 as a good jumping-off point. We identified 11 metrics that will ensure your customer interactions are as effective as possible.

 

7. Low Customer Satisfaction

Your call center’s success hinges on positive customer interactions. If you let too many negative customer interactions slide, your organization will suffer. As Playvox reports, it takes seven positive experiences to make up for one negative customer experience. So you need to get ahead of low customer satisfaction before you lose customers.

 

How To Solve This Problem:

Make your customers’ satisfaction your organization’s top priority. Regularly send out customer surveys to gain valuable feedback. There are two types of surveys you can send. One just generally asks for feedback, asking your customers what they were both satisfied and unsatisfied with. 

The other is a Net Promoter Score survey, which gauges how likely customers are to recommend your product or service to others. Gathering a pool of surveys will inform you of where your business is excelling and where it has room for improvement.

 

8. Your Workforce isn’t Properly Optimized

 

optimize workforce

Source: Five9

Workforce optimization is a key element of call centers. This staffing ensures employees are properly scheduled, trained, monitored, evaluated, rewarded, and engaged. Your call center’s success hangs on the quality of your employees, so optimizing them is key. 

 

How to Solve this Problem:

The best way to optimize your workforce is to closely monitor your agents’ performance with workplace optimization software. These platforms empower you to encourage the best work out of your team. Five9’s platform is specifically designed to improve agent performance so you can increase efficiency, and in turn, customer satisfaction.

 

9. Customer Churn is Negatively Impacting Your Business

CustomerThink reports that customer churn costs businesses more than $75 billion a year. This is the result of customers feeling undervalued and like your organization’s support team isn’t able to offer a solution to their problem.

 

How To Solve This Problem:

The best way to solve this problem is to get ahead of it before it’s too late. There’s a term for that — proactive customer service. As Hubspot writes, that means “your business is actively trying to identify and solve problems before they affect the customer experience.” When you are examining your level of service from this angle, you’ll be more likely to catch problems before it’s too late.

 

10. Scaling Issues are Holding Back

Just like any other organization, call centers grow and change quickly. Your company needs to make sure they’re staffed to keep up with demand. If you aren’t trending in the right direction, your organization will suffer.

 

How to Solve this Problem:

Make sure you are using a VoIP platform as to a legacy phone system. Since VoIP allows you to make real-time inbound and outbound calls over the internet, phone lines are virtual. That means the process to add more lines to your office couldn’t be easier. If you’re ready to make the switch, take a look at our top business VoIP providers for 2021.

 

11. You’re Unable to Provide the Right Support for the Right Customers

Your employees have different strengths, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But if you don’t match up your strength skilled reps with the right inquiries, you risk providing those customers with a poor user experience.

 

How to Solve this Problem:

VoIP software offers multiple features that ensure the appropriate agent is available to take the right call and offer high quality of service. One example is call park, which enables team members to place callers on hold until the appropriate agent is available to handle the inquiry. 

If you have an agent struggling to handle an inquiry, they can also utilize call presence to see if a more seasoned agent is available to take over the call. Features like these commonly available through most business VoIP services.

 

Conclusion: Don’t Let Common Problems Hinder Your Call Center’s Success

Problems with call centers are inevitable — no organization is perfect. But don’t let easy-to-solve problems be the reason your organization isn’t growing and flourishing. Our solutions will make sure there isn’t any problem you can’t solve. If you think your call center software of choice might currently be one of the things holding you back, take a look at this article on call center software pricing.