Transform your contact center into a revenue-generating hub to maximize long-term customer satisfaction and increase profitability. Attract top talent. Equip agents with necessary skills. Motivate agents with the right benefits. Reward agents that enhance customer experiences. Build a customer-focused culture. Implement these strategies to optimize performance and achieve the best return on investment in your contact center.
Maximizing profit is what most businesses are about. Your contact centre plays a critical role in doing this. And yet, many companies forget about the long-term benefits of excellent customer service. Instead, they focus on short-term gains and shoot themselves in the foot in the process. Take, Blockbuster Video Rentals, for instance, generating
$800 million in profits from late fees. As soon as customers found something else that didn’t charge such late fees (Netflix) they went somewhere else. Blockbuster didn’t concern themselves with the customer, only making money from them.
Your contact centre is the face of your company. If done right, the ROI in your contact centre can be
3 – 5 times the amount.
Don’t think of your contact center as just about answering calls and resolving complaints (basically, a necessary evil). Think of your contact centre as a revenue-generating hub for most of your company. You can attract, retain, and grow your customer base and massively boost your ROI with your contact centre as the driving force behind it.
Here are six actionable steps to help you get started:
- Give them a raise: When you pay your agents top dollar, you attract top talent and encourage them to provide exceptional service. It also means you can demand more from them. Rather than getting the person who’s just looking for a temp job, you’re getting an agent who knows they are making a good career from this.
- Provide sales training: This is really where you can hit gold. Give them the power to sell, cross-sell, upsell, and create long-term relationships with customers. This is key in boosting your long-term revenue.
- Give commission from sales: Just like a salesperson, give your agent the opportunity to feel their success by giving them commissions on every sale they provide. The same goes if they bring in more customers and higher revenue.
- Friendly competition: Competition among your contact center agents can help to foster a sense of camaraderie and teamwork while also driving performance. Especially if you have people working in shifts or teams. Leaderboards, reward systems, charts for top-performing agents, or team-based challenges can encourage collaboration and healthy competition. This is also a great way to motivate your agents to perform at their best and drive better results for your business.
- Incentivize growth: Someone has a new idea – great! Try it out. If it works reward your agents for their performance. Not only that, incentivize them to improve their skills and knowledge to provide better service.
- Foster a unique company culture: Great sales and marketing systems get the best results from watching what customers do and giving them what they want. That means listening to your customers in a way that you know what they want. (Hint: it’s often different from what they “ask” for.) You can do the same with your agents. Listen to your agents to find out what fosters an environment of excellence, productivity, and growth.
Start by implementing any of these six steps. The whole idea is to optimize your contact centre's performance, enhance customer satisfaction, and increase your company's profitability. Whatever you do track, test and try out new approaches to get your best return on investment in your contact centre.