Top 5 Call Center Challenges and How To Overcome Them

Call Centers are still the frontline of customer service operations for the majority of businesses worldwide. This makes them the most important customer-facing department for any business.

They also play a major role in creating and managing great customer experiences for existing and potential customers alike.

However, there are a lot of challenges the Call Centers have to face. Some of these challenges are due to changing technology while some are due to changing customer needs and expectations.

Considering all of this, it is important to ensure your Call Centers run properly and perform at the best level at all times. Therefore, it is important to know the top challenges for call centers and how to overcome them.

We will address the top 5 challenges a call center has to face and also explore their solutions. Let’s begin then, shall we?

Top 5 Call Center Challenges and Their Solutions

The best way to improve and sustain your call center’s performance is by knowing, understanding and overcoming all the top challenges.

1. Poor Customer Satisfaction / Experience

Ensuring Customer Satisfaction and a good Customer experience are the main objectives of any call center.

US firms lose almost $62 billion every year due to poor customer service. On the other hand, customer spending increases by almost 140% following a positive customer experience.

Considering these facts, it becomes clear why you need to pay attention to customer satisfaction and a good customer experience.

Multiple factors such as long wait times, no problem resolution, dull agent responses, etc. plague customer satisfaction levels and customer experience.

These issues are common across different industries and hence there are a lot of viable solutions to tackle these.

Solution

To tackle the issue of poor customer satisfaction and experience, you need to begin by measuring and assessing your performance.

When it comes to customer satisfaction and experience, there are important metrics such as Average Handle Time (AHT), Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), Average Speed of Answer (ASA), Abandonment Rate, etc.

Measuring these will give you a better understanding of your performance. With these insights, you will identify all the areas of improvement.

As every metric assesses a different area of performance, you will have ample opportunities to improve customer satisfaction levels and experience.

The tricky part is choosing the right performance metrics. Experiment a bit and go forward with a set of metrics that yield the best performance for you.

2. High Agent Attrition Rate

Corporations and Businesses were pushed into a great state of panic in early 2021. A record number of people started handing out resignations and the numbers are still rising. The entire phenomenon was dubbed The Great Resignation.

Historically, the attrition rate for call centers has always been high around 25% to 30%. It's unclear whether it was the Great Resignation or some other factor but the attrition rate for call centers has shot up to 65% in recent times.

Working in a call center is pretty monotonous. There are also long work hours, low pay and a lack of career growth opportunities. It’s obvious why so many employees hop jobs.

This is a big problem for a workforce-dependent business such as a call center. However, there are ways to tackle it.

Solution

The main change you need to bring in is with regard to the working conditions. Long hours of monotonous work are demotivating. Gamification of operations can help alleviate the tedious nature and make work fun.

You should also have clear career paths. Further training and upskilling opportunities will encourage agents to stick to the organization. With ample opportunities for career progression, agents will look forward to working with the organization in the long term.

Providing appropriate recognition and rewards for good performance is another necessary bit that can prevent attrition.

Offering competitive pay and benefits is a sensitive topic as most call center owners and managers don’t wish to increase operational costs. However, hiring new agents and training them is also an expensive affair.

Diverting those resources towards paying more to your existing agents can help drive down attrition and provide stability.

3. Low Agent Morale

Having unhappy agents is the fastest way of throttling your call center’s performance across the board. The very nature of the job the agents have to perform lowers their morale significantly.

Monotonous, long working hours and dealing with dissatisfied, rude and angry customers day in and day out. Doesn’t sound like an environment that would have you being your day cheerfully, right?

Furthermore, agents are expected to greet every customer in a cheerful and upbeat manner throughout the day. This can become emotionally taxing for them.

The absence of an incentive, be it material or emotional, makes the job more difficult for the agents to carry out.

As a result, you have a workforce with low morale and thus, your call center performance continues to be below average.

Solution

First and foremost, your main objective is to break the monotony. This can be done in multiple ways.

The agents mostly interact with the customers during work. This cycle needs to be broken regularly to encourage interaction between agents.

If your call center manages additional functions such as telemarketing or sales, you can shuffle agents between these operations. This will help break the monotony and allow them to diversify their skill set.

Supervisors and Management should also interact with agents as it positively affirms their contribution. Small talks and casual conversations between superiors and agents help instill a sense of belongingness in agents towards the firm.

Have a reward system in place to incentivize good performance and improvements. Let the agents choose what type of reward they want. Celebrate their wins!

4. Complicated Tech Stack

The use of technology has certainly enabled businesses to make better and more profitable decisions. However, just like everything else, too much technology can negatively impact your performance.

In hopes of further improving their bottom line, businesses employ too many technological systems to aid their decision-making and business operations.

This means every agent has to learn all the technological systems and somehow find a way to maximize the utility of each. This at times becomes a very complicated process and lowers agent productivity.

There is the possibility of some systems having a steeper learning curve. Your agents will either spend a lot of precious time learning these systems or not make use of these systems at all. Either way, it's adding unnecessarily to your operational costs.

Solution

A simple solution to this problem is to only use the technological systems that are operation critical. Limiting the use of technology can drastically reduce the time wasted by agents in learning them. This also means you won’t have to spend on acquiring them.

In case you still want to make use of technology, opt for systems that work well together. A lot of CRMs and data analytics tools natively integrate. This makes the job of an agent easier.

Most systems also offer custom APIs to integrate their functions with your tech stack. With this approach, you can have everything work together.

Moreover, only opt for systems that add real value to your business. This could be in the form of additional revenue, productivity or cost saving.

Test all the systems before you make a purchase. Ensure the system is suitable for your operations and workflows. Opting for user-friendly systems will save you additional time.

5. Subpar/Unreliable IT Infrastructure

No matter the reason, the flow of calls should never stop for any call center. It's like asking a restaurant to earn profits when the kitchen is closed.

The IT infrastructure deployed by a call center is the most critical component for business operations. Without it, there are no calls and without calls, there are no profits.

Network outages and IT infrastructure failure are common scenarios for any tech-based business. The average downtime costs $2300 per minute in lost revenue for any tech business. The problem is that these risks cannot be eliminated.

Your ISP, power, servers, human error, etc. are all single points of failure. While you cannot eliminate these, you can minimize the chances of failure.

Solution

You can create a smart set of redundancies for your IT infrastructure to ensure high resilience and availability. The only issue here is that deploying these measures is not only time-consuming, and complex but also adds to your operational costs.

If the increase in additional operational costs is less than what an outage might cost you, it’s a win for you. However, that may not be the case for everyone.

So what else can you do? You can opt for Connex Carrier Services!

Our systems enable you to have near-zero downtimes and minimal outages. How? Our system architecture is designed to be highly available. We have multiple redundancies in place and we also utilize AnyEdge (Anycast) Load Balancing.

As we’re entirely cloud-based, you enjoy a lot of advantages by opting for us. You can scale your operations quickly and even scale down if necessary. You also eliminate the need for hiring experts to manage and run your servers.

This frees up time and resources for your business which you can utilize to grow it!

Conclusion

Running a business means being always up for facing and overcoming challenges. A lot of things change in the market and within the firm that can create challenges for your business.

Thus, finding the best solution becomes imperative for the existence of the business. The world of call centers and customer service can be particularly tricky to navigate. We hope the problems we discussed and gave solutions to will make your task easy!

What other common problems would you like us to find solutions to?