5 Contact Centre Challenges and How to Solve Them

Running a contact centre can be challenging. Customers expect quick resolution and employees want a positive environment. When problems emerge, it can negatively impact customer service and staff morale. In this post, we’ll explore five top contact centre issues and practical ways to address them.

Common Contact Centre Problems and Solutions

No contact centre is immune to challenges. But successful ones regularly review operations to pinpoint concerns before they escalate. Useful tools for this include customer satisfaction surveys and employee engagement polls. Monitoring these metrics helps leaders get ahead of emerging problems.

Now let’s look at some common contact centre challenges.

Challenge #1: Poor Customer Satisfaction

Providing excellent customer service is crucial for contact centres. Dissatisfied customers lead to lost business. The easiest way to identify whether you have customer satisfaction challenges is to look at your first call resolution (FCR) rate, waiting times and your CSAT scores.

By analysing the call data, you will uncover why these problems are happening. Long wait times are often caused by a lack of resources or too few staff members. You may find customers are bounced between departments, forcing them to repeat information. Or maybe your agents are not sufficiently trained or have easy access to the latest offers or product information, which increases the call length as they search for the answers.

The solution? Implement new call routing procedures and cross-train agents to handle a wider array of issues. Empower customer service reps to spend more time resolving complex calls. AI can also help by finding and suggesting solutions, and even pre-empting customer intent before they must ask. Create a robust knowledge base to help agents resolve customer issues quickly.

With changes like these, you could see improvements within months. Wait times and transfers can be reduced dramatically. Identifying issues and responding quickly can turn things around.

Challenge #2: High Employee Turnover

Did you know that nearly 40% of agents quit within their first year? Exit surveys reveal that agents feel burnt out and lack career advancement opportunities. High churn is problematic, leading to lost expertise and ongoing training costs.

Whilst the job won’t change, there are many solutions that will have a lasting impact. Introduce new supportive policies, like more flexible scheduling and remote work options. Also, create new supervisor roles for high performers to provide promotion opportunities. You can lean on technology to help reduce the stress and workload of your agents with AI-powered chatbots.  Chatbots can help relieve some of the pressure on your staff by handling simple customer inquiries.

Additionally, focus on improving workplace culture through better internal communications and new employee resource groups. These changes can create a more engaging, supportive environment.

With initiatives like these, you will reduce attrition. Supporting your employees better will likely lead to higher retention.

Challenge #3: Limited Budget

Many centres deal with tight budgets yet need technology upgrades. Finding the right balance can be difficult.

For instance, say your contact centre is struggling with outdated systems and insufficient staff to handle call volumes. Customers are experiencing excessive waiting times for help. But there’s no budget increase on the horizon.

By switching to cloud-based routing and CRM, you can minimise hardware costs. New tools also provide reporting to optimise staffing schedules. Cross-train employees to resolve more customer issues directly.

These careful improvements can deliver major gains without a huge investment. Even within tight budget constraints, you may be able to cut wait times to more acceptable levels.

Challenge #4: Technical Disruptions

Relying on technology means outages can severely disrupt operations. Systems need backup plans for when things go wrong.

Implement failover servers to instantly switch to backups during outages. Create processes to notify management of system disruptions. Build in redundancies to isolate technical issues.

Challenge #5: Low Morale

Contact centre agents have a tough job. They handle a plethora of customer enquiries and every single interaction matters. It is vital that organisations strive to create a positive company culture for contact centres. When employees are engaged and motivated, it directly improves customer experiences.

Some organisations have introduced new wellness initiatives like yoga breaks, team lunches and walking meetings with great success. Other options include giving frontline employees more autonomy over schedules and empowering them to resolving customer issues without needing to escalate.

The Cirrus Solution

At Cirrus, we exist to fix poor customer experiences that are all too common with contact centres. Our primary objective is understanding our customers’ challenges and goals. We then implement tailored solutions, combining people and technology, to help them achieve business success.

Rather than just providing features, we focus on creating seamless experiences. We champion the customer service agent who struggles with an outdated system. We enable the customer who just wants to easily complete a request without repeating themselves multiple times. At our core, we strive to create relief through efficiency and empathy.

By partnering with Cirrus, you can forget old notions of contact centres. Instead, make every customer and employee interaction count, one human moment at a time. Contact us today to learn more!