Where did the money go? – Top 10 resource leaks in a contact center and how to fix them

Running a business comes with risks, and chief among them is losing revenue ¹ from missed opportunities or underperformance. Leveraging a contact center for your business should reduce risk, enable you to respond to your customers’ needs, and build brand loyalty so you can grow your business. A contact center is the last place you should be leaking revenue, but unfortunately it happens all the time. Here are the top ten reasons a contact center can eat into your bottom line and how to fix them:

1. Your best agents aren’t addressing your most critical customer issues

Every customer contact is important, but some issues are more demanding than others, and you need to have your best support resources available. Your contact center must be able to route calls by priority to your top agents ² or you risk losing customer confidence.

2. Site visitors aren’t turning into customers

Every user that visits your site is a potential customer ³, and if your contact solution isn’t offering them a frictionless way to connect, they can slip through your fingers. A solution should provide one-click connection to your agents from your site and a selection of 800-numbers customers can call based on their specific issues.

3. Customers won’t take your calls

If you are still calling your customers from 800-numbers or out-of-state area codes, there is a good chance they won’t answer ⁴, and a high risk they won’t be your customers much longer. Dynamic CallerID matches your ID to the region your customers are in, boosting answer rates by up to 35% to keep you in touch with your customers.  

4. Poor internal communication

A disorganized team is ineffective and inefficient ⁵, so an effective contact center solution must facilitate communication amongst your team as well as with your customers. You need features like individual and group chat, call forwarding, and voicemail-to-email to keep your team in touch, in tune, and able to respond to customer needs effectively.   

5. Geographically dispersed teams get out of sync

A distributed workforce ⁶ that blends branch office staff with remote workers provides flexibility but also presents challenges maintaining corporate uniformity and oversight. When teams are not on the same page, resources, morale, and revenue are all at risk. Your contact center solution should provide you complete oversight of your organization, empowering you to implement role-based permissions and data access that is user or region-specific. This reduces redundant effort, maintains flexibility, and saves money. A robust solution will go even further, empowering you to set-up time zones on a per-user, per-queue, and per-IVR basis that, paired with call routing based on work schedules, can help avoid timing problems that prevent calls from getting through at certain hours.

6. You aren’t getting the data you need

You need to know the growth dynamic of your calls from one month to the next, how staff increases can reduce customer wait time, or how many calls are getting escalated to managers. You need data ⁷ on your contact center performance so you can make informed business decisions and direct your resources effectively. If your contact center solution is not providing detailed, easy to interpret data you’re most assuredly losing revenue and squandering resources ⁸.

7. You aren’t prepared for the calls your receive

The time your customers spend on the phone with your agents is precious ⁹, and if you don’t have customer data at the ready when they call, you risk wasting that time. If you are using a CRM ¹⁰ to manage customer information, your contact center solution needs to as well. Incoming calls should be instantly cross-referenced with CRM data, so agents are ready to provide customized service as efficiently as possible, and logged to lead profiles so agents can continue customer conversations seamlessly. Real integration means you can click on phone numbers in your CRM for instant dialing rather than keying in digit-by-digit. 

8. Losing customers due to long hold times

Customer patience is a valuable and finite resource ¹¹. When you lose it, you lose revenue and put your reputation at risk. If your contact center is not giving you real-time feedback on customer wait times and prioritizing calls ¹² for elevation of support, you can’t provide customers with the quality support they demand, and you invite them to find a competitor who can.

9. Wasting time with overly complicated contact center tools

Businesses need powerful contact center tools, not complicated ones. Time spent learning complex software is time not spent growing your business and improving your bottom-line. Cloud-based ¹³, easily accessible, and intuitively designed software anticipates your needs leveraging prevailing functionality that empowers businesses to focus on building value.

10. It’s not secure

Cyber-attacks cost companies Big Time ¹⁴, with up to 60% of small business folding ¹⁵ within 6 months of an attack. You shouldn’t have to worry about the security of your contact center solution. The good news is cloud-based telephony, with features such as encrypted calling, storage, and two-factor authentication, helps you decrease the potential vectors of attack, and it takes the burden off your IT staff by staying on the bleeding-edge of security technology to keep your data and business safe.

All of those issues and more can be mitigated with the help of Callision’s cloud contact center. Sign up today at “callision.com/registration” to get started.

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