The pandemic has brought lots of challenges especially in the contact center industry. Agents have been round the clock to support an increase in calls as well as increase in the sensitivity and complexity of the calls.
To keep them motivated and efficient employers need to provide constant training to their agents to improve their soft and technical skills, particularly communication skill. Strong communication skills will help with adequately addressing customer needs, maintaining high customer satisfaction, and receiving a high volume of calls with minimal customer drop-off. The better the agent understands the nature of the customer inquiry, the more easily the agent will address the problem.
Soft skills have been particularly important during the pandemic, as customers have been contacting contact centers with greater frequency and with issues that require more attention.
Every agent should be skilled with his communication skills. They should be proficient in the use of communication and questioning techniques. They should be able to quickly understand the problem and active resolution. Poor communication will result in long queue; long wait time and more call traffic.
Other soft skills which can contribute to the improvement of calls, supported by good communication skills, are empathy and self-awareness. These attributes have been increasingly important in the post-Covid landscape.
In addition to improving the customer experience, strong English language skills or other native language skill of your area can increase performance of agents. The better the ability to cope with uncertainty and deploy strategic and adaptable questioning strategies, combined with empathetic tones and language, the more calls a center can address. In short, having strong interpersonal skills will drastically support contact center effectiveness. In the post-Covid world, it’s more vital than ever to have high call volumes combined with customer satisfaction.
The key metrics that will be impacted as a result of the heightened stress on contact centers,
- Average Handle Time (AHT)
- First Call Resolution (FCT)
- Hold Times
- Customer Experience (UX)
- Abandonment Rate (AR)
Effectively testing new hires can drastically help with mitigating the above problems in contact centers, as well as help managers with running high-performing contact centers.
Assessing English language proficiency is so important to help businesses improve the quality of their communication, reduce complaints related to language problems and misunderstandings, and improve the quality of their hiring.
[box type=”note” align=”” class=”” width=””]About ZRG
Founded in 1994, ZRG International is an ICT solutions company with a major focus on customer interaction technologies and solutions. We offer experience and innovation to help businesses manage customer relationship and achieve higher customer satisfaction and increased profitability.
ZRG has a proven track record of introducing innovations and exciting new possibilities in the customer communication areas. Our line of solutions cover all aspects of customer communication including customer contact center, CRM application suite, quality assurance suite, call center management tools, self-service automation tools, campaign management and teleconferencing. Our solutions are deployed at mission critical contact centers that are being used to provide information, assistance and services to millions of users each day through live agent and self-service based applications.
ZRG has an experienced and knowledgeable team capable of quickly designing and adding tailor-made features in our solutions for site-specific requirements. By using open standards systems, specifications and protocols, we ensure maximum flexibility and future growth of our solutions. We use innovative techniques to deliver latest features and integration capabilities in a most cost-effective manner. Our deployment team has successfully completed all our projects well before the deadlines.
Every day, on every project, we deliver value through our accumulated technical knowledge and project management skills. Our expertise delivers immediate benefits to our clients with cost and time savings. Our solution delivers increased operational efficiency and staff productivity to our valued clients. This is what we do. We deliver beyond expectations.
For more details:-www.zrg.com[/box]