Workforce Management Featured Article
Top 3 Problems in the Call Center
Call centers are the backbone of most companies. Any organization large enough to have a call center in place relies heavily on the agents working there to provide great customer experiences that will keep consumers coming back for more. Therefore, call centers have quite a bit of power and, as Uncle Ben tells Peter Parker, “With great power comes great responsibility.”
Given what an important role call centers play in the success of organizations, it’s hard to believe that they’re not the most looked-after part of a company. And yet, call centers have countless problems, operational and otherwise. Let’s take a look at some of the most common issue these organizations face on a daily basis.
Agent absenteeism. As Call Centre Helper points out, “According to benchmarking firm Dimension Data (News - Alert), the average annual absence rate in contact centers across the globe is 11 percent. To the layperson, this might not seem particularly high. But the stark reality is that a 100-seat contact center with 11 percent absenteeism will only have an average of 89 seats occupied at any one time.” This can turn into a major problem during high volume call times like noon or 5 p.m. Not to mention the fact that morale can be negatively affected due to missing agents, since the agents that did show up will have to pick up the slack.
Agent engagement. Let’s be honest…call center work isn’t the most exciting. It’s necessary, of course, but can become monotonous. The work is repetitive in nature and some organizations have a tendency to put unrealistic expectations on agents. Plus, if organizations don’t have up to date programs in place, the work can become even more arduous.
Poor integration. Call Centre Helper points out that call centers have a variety of different software, including predictive dialers, CRM databases, workforce management (WFM) tools and so on. As Ben Dale-Gough, site operations manager at insurance contact centre operator Domestic & General (D&G) puts it: “With a variety of different vendors and products, contact centre agents can be working with more than ten different software systems. Each application is designed to perform a specific task such as data capture or outbound dialling, [and] with many in use at once, the job [becomes] far more complicated. Agents often find it tricky to tackle the maze of different systems which has detrimental effects on their work.”
