Call centers are the face of any company’s customer services and can play an important role in attracting and retaining a large customer base. They are the key to sales generation as well as building a strong relationship with potential customers.
All said, establishing and then operating successful call center is not at all an easy task. Many obstacles and challenges make operating and running a call center harder than it looks. Here are few reasons that make running of call centers a tedious task.
- Employee Non-attendance
According to statistics, rate of absence of call center employees is 11% worldwide. It looks meagre stats but when we talk about a call center, if 89 seats out of 100 seats are empty, the impact on quality of service will be huge, surprisingly. This is because fewer staff will be available to answer the customers’ queries, which can result in long wait queues that really are frustrating for the customers, this also increases burden on present call agents and they have to shorten their responses to their customers. Absenteeism also has an adverse effect on the staff’s morale.
- Turnover Rate
High turnover rate, just like in any other department have negative impact on a call centre’s quality because as a trained staff leaves, it leaves a void in the provision of quality services to the customers. Moreover, the high cost of hiring, training and developing new staff makes it an adverse activity and can affect the productivity of overall organization.
- Agents’ Morale
Call center job can be quite monotonous and doing the same thing all day long can become boring. This can directly affect their productivity as they can become stressed out and unenthusiastic about their job. This can be demoralising for the employees and in turn can result in high rate of turnover. The company can address this by improving the environment with keeping the targets achievable and less strictures on the staff.
- Flat Structures
According to research, less than a third of companies ever define a career development for the call center employees. It is a common practice that call centers have flat structures. There are limited opportunities to grow professionally. This may demotivate talented employees and increase turnover rate as a result.
- Cost Cutting
Global recession is one of the major factors that mandates cost cutting. Another thing that triggers it is the high costs of staffing the call center. Call centers are being asked to cut their costs, especially in public sector on the premise of budget cuts. In other sectors as well, executives no longer considers call center efficiency saving as an option; instead, they are going for it to be standard.
- Poor Integration
In today’s digital world, call centers are bombarded with new software that addresses various areas, like predictive dialers, CRM databases, sales order processing platforms etc., it becomes tricky for the agents to handle these complicated systems and hence, they create more nuisances rather than increase the productivity.
However, software like, Rosponseai.com is best way to reduce this complexity of systems and provide best call center operational solution in an optimum manner.
These are some hurdles or rather, reasons that make operating of call centers a hard task and it takes proper planning and consistent input into its functioning that can keep it running in a successful manner.