If you have ever worked in a call center, then you know following best practices is really hard. For many teams, especially those with high turnover, just getting through the day is difficult enough.
So I’m not blogging from an ivory tower acting like it’s easy to maintain call center best practices — it’s not — it requires dedicated managers and constant training.
But it is really important. If you lose sight of the fundamentals, every day is going to be that much harder.
I’ve identified eight critical call center best practices. It won’t take you long to read, it won’t cost you a dollar to implement, and you will start seeing gains immediately.
1. Recognize great call center employees
There is nothing touchy-feely about this. One of the chief reasons that people leave their job is lack of recognition. Turnover costs money. Therefore you can save your company money by recognizing employees who are doing a good job.
One of the most insane call center statistics is the average turnover rate — it’s about 30-45%, and sometimes much higher. The harsh reality is that employee burnout in this industry is the norm.
Showing gratitude can go a long way in keeping agents motivated, alleviating work-related stress, and ultimately providing better customer experiences.
But you don’t want to put the spotlight on specific employees and leave everyone else in the dark either. Otherwise, you may risk making some agents feel discriminated against and create a toxic work environment.
It’s best to encourage friendly competition. One way to do this is by assessing agent performance across important call center metrics, like first call resolutions, qualified leads, customer satisfaction scores, and so on.
You can then set up leaderboards and the employees who hit or exceed those targets, get the top spots — such call center gamification is something you can set up on your own, though platforms include it as a feature.
This is an excellent way to acknowledge high-performing employees and simultaneously motivate the rest to work harder, with no costs and hard feelings involved.
2. Simplify IVR greeting menus and prompts
Is your interactive voice response (IVR) system offering callers more than five options at any point?
Five options is the rule of thumb limit for how many options you should offer in a phone menu before callers will start to get confused. And when callers get confused, they tie up your agents.
Another simple check making sure IVR prompt brings up the menu option’s purpose before mentioning the number customers should press on the dial pad.
Purpose first, number second, like:
“For sales, press 1.”
That’s perfect. Don’t do it the other way around because it’s harder for callers.
These are two little things, but they add up across thousands of calls into your system every month. Even a marginal increase in containment rate or decrease in misrouted calls will increase customer satisfaction.
So make sure your call center follows best practices for IVR design. Without routine oversight, an IVR will stop being as useful. Internal changes at your organization may require you to adjust prompts and call flows. Simply adding another menu option may not be enough to keep the IVR easy for callers to use.
But even if nothing changes at your organization, customer inquiries evolve over time. By updating your IVR to cater to these new needs, you can better serve customers without agent intervention.
3. Set up detailed FAQ pages
Make sure your FAQ pages are detailed and provide customers with genuinely helpful information. On your website, in your app, wherever it is that customers are going to go for information before they contact you.
And that’s the key. There are tons of people who would prefer not to have to speak to anyone in order to make a purchase or pay a bill. If you can help them, that’s one less person calling into your call center. It’s a win-win.
Address the most common inquiries first. Check your customer service data and talk to your agents to identify the problems customers deal with most frequently.
Your answers should be concise yet highly informative and provide step-by-step instructions with visual aids whenever appropriate. If you have support documentation or a knowledge base, link your FAQ pages to more in-depth articles about each specific topic.
4. Train agents to use positive language
Customers occasionally call in with issues that can’t be fixed. And things can get awkward. Maybe a customer requests a refund, but you have a no-refund policy, or the only agent qualified to solve a specific problem is on sick leave.
Using positive language can still turn things around and prevent customers from feeling too disappointed. In short, positive language involves telling customers what you can do, rather than being blunt and simply saying you can’t solve their inquiries.
For instance, if you don’t handle refunds, let callers know about it, but also mention that you can offer store credit instead. The idea is to provide customers with workarounds so they can still walk away with something of value, even if the solution they originally looked for is unavailable.
It can have a significant impact on how consumers perceive your company, while service agents will have to deal with less angry customers. In other words, make sure to implement positive language in your call center scripts and coach agents until it becomes second nature to them.
5. Refresh call center job descriptions
This is a standard best practice in business — not that everyone stays on top of it, I know — but in a call center it’s absolutely vital. For one thing, this is a tech-forward space, so you want to make sure that you are asking for the skills and certifications you need this year, not 2-3 years ago.
Copy-pasting the same job description that’s been around for years is not going to get you the best possible candidates. It takes time to really evaluate the job description and ensure that it meets current requirements, but it’s worth doing. Hiring the wrong people also takes a lot of time and it’s much more expensive.
What about refreshing the salary? Probably a good idea. If it has been a few years since you benchmarked compensation for a call center role, chances are it’s out of date. You will not be attracting the right type of candidates if the comp is not aligned with market expectations.
Again, this is standard business stuff, but there are tons of virtual call centers willing to hire people anywhere in the world. Many of these companies offer salary, benefits, and even equipment like headsets and laptops. You are competing for talent with these companies, whether you like it or not.
6. Draft a call center SOP
A call center SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) is a set of guidelines covering daily call center operations. It generally includes administrative policies, schedules, guidance for unusual circumstances, software instructions, target KPIs, and so on.
SOPs help improve productivity, streamline onboarding processes, and manage any potential crises more effectively. Agents can quickly check the guidelines whenever necessary and solve any hiccups on their own — no need to wait for help from supervisors or managers and potentially disrupt workflows.
That said, your SOP should describe all of your call center processes in detail and thoroughly explain how agents can use your call center tools and how they work. Include walkthroughs for how to navigate Call Center Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software they are responsible for using.
Include information about performance expectations. Be direct and honest about any call center quality monitoring that will be in use. The goal is to make sure that people know how they are being assessed.
7. Unify sales and service data
Letting that data flow between the two departments can benefit your business across all fronts, and ultimately increase revenue. For instance, service teams can check sales data to better understand common customer pain points and use that information to deliver better service experiences.
Meanwhile, sales teams can take a peek at service data to identify what products or services existing customers use and how often they use them, which opens up room for potential up-sells and cross-sells.
Companies that apply this practice are more likely to boost customer spending compared to those that don’t. In other words, don’t treat your customer service and sales teams as two completely separate entities—they should work in conjunction.
Encourage collaboration between departments and make customer data easily accessible for both sides. If you use call center software, and haven’t done so already, see whether your provider integrates with your CRM and helpdesk software.
8. Focus on the metrics that matter
Speaking of data, there is a lot of noise in call center reporting — only a few indicators will have an major impact. Chasing after as many metrics as possible will only divert your attention and lead to analysis paralysis.
Here’s a quick rundown of key call metrics any call center should focus on:
- First Call Resolutions (FCR): It indicates the percentage of solved customer inquiries during initial agent contact—without further callbacks. First call resolution helps streamline productivity, reduce operational costs, and improve customer satisfaction.
- Average Handling Time (AHT): It measures how long it takes for agents to complete customer interactions—with wait times and post-call work included. AHT helps identify potential bottlenecks and inquiries about particular products or services that take longer than usual to solve as well as meet customer expectations.
- Average Speed of Answer (ASA): It pinpoints how long it takes on average for agents to pick up calls from customers waiting in queue. ASA reveals whether or not call routing is optimized, which is crucial to minimize customer frustration.
- Call abandonment rate: It reveals the percentage of calls dropped before reaching a live agent. A high call abandonment rate is a strong indicator of a poorly developed IVR system, trouble with ASA, and other technical difficulties.
- Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): It tells you whether customers are happy with your services. CSAT is calculated manually and requires you to set up and deploy customer surveys.
- Agent Effort Scores (EAS): It indicates how comfortable agents are with customers and whether they encounter any difficulties when solving inquiries. Like with CSAT, you need to deploy agent surveys to calculate this score.
- Percentage of calls blocked: It measures the percentage of incoming calls that get automatically disconnected by your phone system. Consistent high rates are tell-tale signs that you don’t have enough resources to handle current incoming call volumes and need to scale operations.
