When you work in a call center, time per call is very important. If you spend too much time per call, it means that you’re effectively wasting time. Every wasted minute with one customer is a minute that another customer has to wait to get help.
Your goal should be to lower your time per call. We’re here to help you hit the ground running and learn how to be more productive by cutting your time on calls. Keep reading to discover eight (8) simple tricks to lower your call center time per call.
1. Use a Shorter Greeting on Your Calls
Most people who work in a call center develop a routine for speaking with customers. This routine usually includes a standard greeting to warm the customer up. Unfortunately, too many call center workers have greetings that are overly long.
It’s important to shorten your standard greeting while still leaving a polite and positive impression. Since this will affect every phone call that you take, a shorter greeting can seriously lower your average time per call.
2. No More Open Questions for Customers
A large part of your job at the call center is customer service. If the customers have a problem, then you need to find a solution, which usually means asking customers questions to figure out what they need.
It’s important to ask customers questions so you can get to the bottom of things. If you ask open-ended questions, customers may end up rambling, and this takes up way too much of your time!
Focus on asking close-ended questions. For example, “when did this happen” gets you a quick, concrete answer, but “how did this happen” may invite the customer to speculate and ramble.
3. Take Notes During Your Calls
Even if your average time per call is pretty low, your manager is also paying attention to another metric: your after-call time. Basically, they are paying attention to how long it takes you after a call to resolve whatever the customer needed.
After-call times are sometimes longer than they need to be because employees wait until after the call to start writing down important information. To seriously shave time off your after-call average, take notes during the call rather than waiting until later.
Doing this also helps you write down important information as soon as you hear it. If you have a bad memory or just worry about forgetting something important, writing down notes during a call will be a real game-changer for you.
4. Roleplay to Solve Lengthy Calls
Your call center training probably focused on the typical kinds of calls you get each day. Your training may not have prepared you for those long phone calls that seem to take forever. How, then, can you prepare for these calls?
We recommend roleplaying these lengthy phone calls with your colleagues. Afterward, you should collectively try to come up with solutions to resolve these calls quicker.
Putting your heads together will help the group come up with multiple possible solutions. At the same time, your collective stories will help give everyone a better idea of how to recognize and solve a lengthy call.
5. Regular Call Monitoring Improves Results in Call Centers
Many call center workers don’t like being monitored by their managers. They often compare this to having someone looking over their shoulder.
However, your manager isn’t here to tear you down; he’s here to help you perform better. Having supervisors monitor your calls is one of the best ways to do that!
With regular call monitoring, your boss can help you discover what is making your calls too long and help workshop ideas to lower the average time per call. Plus, your willingness to be recorded helps show your manager your willingness to improve your performance.
6. Better Information Access during Call Center Operations
Remember when we said most calls focused on solving problems for customers? In order to resolve these issues, it’s important for you to have access to all of the information you need about the customer and the account.
If your workplace has a good CRM, we recommend adding relevant information about customers into your database during calls or immediately afterward. This helps you and others immediately access this information when you need it.
7. Shadowing Your Call Center Colleagues
One of the best ways to lower call center time per call can be summed up in one word: shadowing.
During employee training, it’s important to let new hires shadow veteran employees. This helps the veteran model what an efficient phone call is and how to resolve each call quickly.
But shadowing doesn’t have to be limited to a training period. We recommend that employees ask to shadow their colleagues on a regular basis in order to learn from them. In turn, you should be willing to be shadowed so that you can pass on your knowledge to others.
8. Collaborate With Colleagues in the Call Center
“Collaboration” may sometimes seem like a buzzword your manager loves a little too much. However, collaboration really is the key to better performance, especially when it comes to lowering the average time per call.
We recommend that you initiate collaborative opportunities on a regular basis. This could institute employee-led workshops, informal discussions, working lunches, and more.
Collaboration allows workers to learn from one another, which is a great way to boost performance. At the same time, collaboration helps workers feel more like a tight-knit family, which is great for employee morale.
Achieve Your Full Potential as a Call Center Worker
Now you know some of our favorite techniques to help lower your call center time per call. Do you also know where you can find a call center that values your talents and everything you have to offer?
We are always searching for new members of the Seguros Confie family – are you ready to take that step? To find out more about what makes us a great place to work, contact us today!