Few jobs in the customer service industry can match the challenge of running a call center. Since your job revolves around fending off rapid-fire demands from competing concerns, you must succeed at managing call center problems and solutions daily as a call center manager. Employees, customers, technology, and management are all part of it.

In this post, we’ll go over the top ten call center issues that are divided into four categroies and how to fix them.

Employees

Hiring and training recruits take time and money, and keeping them is even more difficult. If you’re not careful, your agents may become burned out and only come to work when they’re in the mood.

1. Absenteeism

Unplanned absences cost your call center money and deteriorate customer service and employee morale.

• Examine the pattern of absences to manage absenteeism better. Are they only reachable at certain times of the year, or do they correspond to particular holidays? It will assist you in determining the causes of absences.
• Develop a set of policies for absences to encourage your agents to give advance notice so that arrangements can be made, such as finding someone to cover their shift.
• Holding your agents accountable is another good way to cut down on absenteeism. It is up to a manager to enforce your absence policy once it has been established and the expectations are clear.

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2. Attrition

When an employee leaves, you lose all of the time, effort, and training that went into them. That cost starts to hurt your bottom line in an industry where employee turnover is between 30-40%. Since it is a high-pressure job with few incentives or opportunities for advancement, call centers have a high attrition rate.

Few ways to reduce turnover:

• More selective training, competitive pay and rewards, and the provision of necessary tools.
• Look for candidates who have stayed with previous employers for a long time, offer incentives to attract more dependable and productive employees. 
• Provide them with software tools to help them succeed in their jobs.

3. Engagement 

Employee enthusiasm is difficult to maintain in any industry, but it is even more difficult in a call center. It’s easy for agents to become demoralized due to the stressful and monotonous work, which leads to absenteeism and turnover. Due to the heavy workload, agents may believe they lack the resources to handle customer needs effectively. 

Here are a few ideas for resolving the problem. 

• Empower agents to assist customers, automate workload, incentivize performance, and provide timely feedback. 
• Allow your agents to focus on more complex questions by using automated menus to answer routine questions.

Customers

When customers call your call centers, they usually only want to get help right away. You must ensure that you provide excellent customer service to keep your call center open and running.

4. First Call Resolution (FCR)

One of the most important metrics for a call center is call resolution on the first attempt because it demonstrates efficiency. As customer concerns become more complex, finding a solution without multiple touchpoints becomes more difficult.

As a result, it’s critical to establish a common knowledge base, conduct root-cause analysis, and evaluate key performance indicators (KPIs). 

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• Recording common questions and populating them with approved answers. 
• Identifying the top reasons why customers call your call center outsourcing solutions.
• Constantly evaluating the metrics will help you gather and gain the insights you need to improve your customer service.

5. Self-Service

Customers prefer to solve problems on their own, and they appreciate it when a company makes it simple to find answers without speaking with a representative. Increasing customer self-service options improves customer satisfaction and relieves pressure on your agents, allowing them to focus on more complex customer issues.

• Create a customer knowledge base, implement easy-to-navigate IVR menus, and provide multiple communication channels to accomplish this.
• Create a searchable customer-facing resource using your agent’s knowledge base and set up a simple phone menu that includes a section with answers to frequently asked questions.
• Allow customers to engage with your agent via their preferred communication channel when they can’t find what they’re looking for.

Technology

The modern call center is brimming with technology and tools, from customer relationship management (CRM) to predictive dialers. The problem is getting them to cooperate and work consistently with one another.

6. Integrations

As a call center, your agents constantly switch between multiple databases, which becomes a problem when 60% of first-call resolution failures are due to the agent’s inability to access data. Don’t make your agent’s life difficult by leaving them to juggle multiple tools when they can all be integrated into one platform.

• Adopting software that integrates with existing call center applications, choosing platforms with multiple system integrations, and looking for vendors who have consolidated their tools into one system can all help them.
• Looking for services that advertise integration with CRM and consolidating the tools into one system.
• Look for newer software that comes with integration options with tools that you are already using. It’s easier to manage a set of integrated tools when you have customers on the phone, and every second counts.

7. Scaling 

From one season to the next, call volume spikes, forcing you to increase or reduce staff, resulting in a constant cycle of adding and removing seats from your phone system. Modern call centers rely on cloud-based call center software, which allows managers to add and remove seats with a few clicks via an online portal.

Management 

Management 

You have KPIs to meet, which are usually imposed by upper management. The issue arises when these metrics emphasize the number of customers served rather than the quality of service provided.

8. Metrics

Managers of call centers make decisions based on real-time data. Traditional call center metrics do not always provide a complete picture. 

Get more information from your metrics to make better business decisions.

• Consider nontraditional metrics, provide useful metrics to customers, and tailor your metrics to your call center’s needs. 
• When customers call, provide them with metrics like wait times and queue positions to help them make data-driven decisions. 
• Make sure your phone system provider provides call detail reports so you can examine them in detail.

9. Improve Performance 

Improve performance 

When it comes to performance improvement, most call centers have flat structures with little upward mobility. Employees lose motivation and performance as a result of a lack of career opportunities.

Ideas to resolve this issue

• Manage expectations, provide opportunities for top performers, and focus on the right metrics. 
• Make it clear what opportunities exist in your call center. Give your top performers extra responsibilities to gain skills and experience that will help them in the future.
• Assessing an agent’s performance and identifying areas for improvement will necessitate looking beyond quantitative data.

10. Collaborating Across Departments

Collaborate across departments 

When it comes to answering phones with customer issues such as shopping issues or defective products, call centers require the assistance of multiple departments. Recognize your agent’s limitations, but also look for ways to improve departmental relationships.

Link databases across departments so that each employee has a complete picture of your call center’s interactions with customers.

The front lines of customer service are call centers, and after reviewing these 10 most common call center issues, you’ll be able to see where your call center is vulnerable and how you can shore up your defenses.

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