Top 5 Call Center Challenges To Watch For In 2017

The biggest challenges that come to the call center environment on a very definite term, are the ones when the service provider has to reduce the gap between the customer needs and the attributes of the services. And for the same reason, the need to understand the customers has become essential before designing your services. Because then customer success becomes more likely.

Call center environment has evolved because of the cloud technology and it has brought many innovations to it with result oriented changes.

Challenges become opportunities if you have understood the core of it, all the challenges in customer service environment if tackled well then end up with a happy customer base. Let’s see what all challenges are there to be faced for the year 2017.

1. Unified Communication For Customers

The customers are looking for enormous value given to their time and if you have a setup that helps your business to give a seamless experience to your customers then it’s always beneficial for the business.

But deciding on the point, if your customers really want a unified communication interface then it asks for a budget that you are going to need for the whole set up. But the cloud has made the idea of unified communication a lot easier.

A seamless experience is one of the most vital factors that makes the customers more inclined towards a loyal customer base.

2. Call Centers As Social Media Hubs

Social media is a place where the customers have found a totally new perspective because of the cloud hosting of call centers and most of the customers are 24×7 on the social media platforms. They share their feedbacks and make decisions for a final purchase depending on the way various attributes of the service are perceived by the customers.

Social media is a powerful tool in this sense and the challenge is to tap its full potential in the coming year. There are various tools that are coming in the market frequently. Now, the challenge is to use them effectively to reap the best benefits out of it.

3. Managing The Remote Agents Well

Remote agenting is one of the best practices that has made the call center scenario more challenging as well as productive. Challenging in the sense that an agent sitting somewhere in a distant place should be well trained with the ongoing ways of customer service that suit best.

Although by using a call center software, the call center manager is always in touch with his distantly located agents and can instruct any agent, accordingly. The customer related information is always handy for the agents.

4. Self-Help Tools For Better Customer Engagement

Customers have gradually become more aware with time and they prefer to help themselves by using various self-help tools. It saves a lot of time for the customers and also a meaningful customer engagement comes into the picture with it.

The self-help tools like cloud-hosted IVRs have always been of tremendous help in the customer service environment so far but the challenge ahead is to make such tools more intuitive and more customer centric.

5. Improving The Average Handling Time

The average handling time is one of the deciding factors for the efficiency of your call center and the every step taken should be meaningful towards improving it. An agent who is well prepared and well equipped with information related to the customers is always of big help.

Features like predictive dialing, automatic call distribution have made the scenario more result-oriented. And the idea behind these sophisticated features is just to provide the customer with a suitable solution without any delay.

Challenges Are Opportunities

If the challenges are met with full preparation, then they work as opportunities. It is necessary to create the most productive services that make the contemporary scenario more inclined towards customer benefits and a satisfactory experience that should be long lasting for the customers.

The year ahead is very promising for the call center environment because the cloud is supporting it throughout and because of the same reason, innovations are coming in the picture more frequently in the call center environment.

It is true that the challenges ahead are many but the cloud is supporting the contemporary call centers to face these challenges with a positive mindset.