Call centers usually face many challenges and one of them is the scarcity of skilled agents. It becomes difficult to have agents that can quickly finish the call and also give resolution within a single call to the customer. Due to a lack of skilled agents’ team, call centers often face long call queues and because of that increased frustration of the customers. The call centers can remove this roadblock by encouraging customers to use self serving options. Along with filling the gap of not having enough manual resources, this can also help in leveraging many other benefits such as increased customer satisfaction, increased ROI, etc.
Generally, all call centers put in place the self serving options, but those are not used by the customers. So what can a call center do to increase the use of these options? Here are a few effective tips that can help a call center increase the use of self serving options:
- Configure IVR correctly
One of the fundamental features offered by all call center solutions is an interactive voice responsive system. All call centers have this feature in place still people do not use it. To encourage the use of IVR based self serving options to follow the below mentioned tips:
- Keep messages short. It is very irritating for a customer to listen to a long message and act accordingly. Thus, often customers do not pay attention to these prompts and wait for an option which says, “Talk to customer support executive”. The solution is to keep messages short.
- Keep menus short. Too many menu items also make it difficult for customers to remember the options. They often get lost and because of this, it becomes difficult for them to use this self serving feature. Thus, limit the options in the IVR.
In a nutshell, be very careful when you configure an IVR system that you want truly be used.
- Use chatbots
This is the time of artificial intelligence and this is the time to get benefited with the power of technology. AI based chatbots are now offered by the call center solution providers as well as from independent providers. One can implement these chatbots on the website. This will be very effective and useful because more and more people have started using chatbots and customers actually do interact with these bots to get answers to their questions.
- Add a webpage of commonly asked questions
Some questions of the customers are asked frequently. To save the time of the agents answering these questions, a call center can put an FAQ page on the website in which one adds all commonly asked questions along with its precise answers.
- Update self serving options regularly
Whether you use a call center solution or any other option to self-serve the customer, you must keep a habit of refining those options so they can answer the latest queries of customers. Update your IVR prompts, chat intents and other self serving options as well. This will keep your self-serving options up to date to encourage more self serving option use.