How to Deal with High Volume Calls – Best Tips & Strategies

Studies show that an unexpected call volume decreases efficiencies and contributes to a fall in your agent’s productivity by up to 25%, leading to longer wait times and frustration for your customer. 

In this blog, you will understand the multifaceted nature of handling high call volumes. You can experiment with both proactive strategies for reducing calls and reactive strategies for efficient call management. Besides, you can optimize call routing and improve agent efficiency by optimizing technology to create a positive work environment and ensure your call center services will rush and thrive. 

If you’d like to get detailed information about how to master volume calls, balance efficient operations with efficient customer service, and achieve customer satisfaction. Let’s dive into a detailed discussion.

Understanding the Causes: Why Does Call Volume Spike?

High call volumes can create a state of disorder and confusion in even the most prepared call center. For example, a sudden peak in call volume can lead to long waiting times for your customers, causing frustration and leading to damage to your brand reputation. It can also stress your agents and lead to both lower morale and productivity. So, you need to identify the essential strategy to enhance growth in order to manage it well and avoid any difficult effects on your organization.  When you understand the causes, you should plan to go ahead, avoid trouble, and provide better service to your customers. 

 

Identifying Common Triggers: Several factors contribute to sudden call volume increases:

• Marketing campaigns: Successful campaigns, particularly new-product or service-launch campaigns, often result in spikes in calls. To take your recent example, a flash sale can cause ten times as many calls as an ordinary day.
• Do product launches/issues: New product launches can obviously prompt some inquiries. But when technology breaks, or products arrive damaged, the rush of your frustrated customers seeking fixes can create an even larger surge of demand. Imagine a software update that led to widespread login issues.
• Seasonal Peaks: Certain industries can be predictable and see slight seasonal jumps at specific times of year. Tax preparation companies experience a significant uptick in business during tax season, while your retailers have spikes in business around the major holidays of Black Friday and Christmas.
• Emergencies: Catalysts such as natural disasters or widespread system failures create a surge of calls as your customers demand for both information and support.
• Billing cycles: The closing days of your billing cycles will inevitably bring a deluge of calls about payments, invoices, and billing questions.
• External Events: External events — major news events, the trending of a topic on social media or competitor actions — can either, for better or worse, create an unexpected impact on call volume.

Analyzing Patterns and Predictability: Some spikes are unpredictable, but many of you are patterned. Look at your past patterns and your historical data to identify these trends and make predictions. Consider:

• Day of the week: Call volume usually differs on weekdays and weekends.
• Time of day: Some hours have consistently higher volume.
  Seasonality: Establish a pattern of seasonal hikes and get ready accordingly.

Good insights formed from data enable accurate estimations of activity in the future, so proactive adjustments to the workforce resources can be made for staffing, budget, and preemptive customer outreach.

The Impact of Inadequate Preparation: Failure to prepare for high call volume has serious consequences:

• Increased Wait Times & Abandonment Rates: Long wait times increase frustration and abandonment rates among your customers, resulting in lost business.
• Negative Customer Experience: Bad service spoils your brand image and loyal customers.
• Agent Burnout: Agents who are overloaded get stressed out and burnt out, and turnover rates can go higher.
• Missed Service Level Agreements (SLAs): Not hitting SLAs could mean penalties and lost business.

Proactive Strategies: Reducing Incoming Call Demand

A high call volume may interrupt your business operations and lower your customer satisfaction and agent morale. Before you think about optimizing your reactive strategies (such as call routing), you need to focus on proactive data-driven measures to reduce the number of incoming calls. This is a significant improvement in efficiency and increases your customer experience. Here are some powerful proactive strategies that focus on enhancing your self-service options.

Enhancing Self-Service Options: Empowering Customers to Help Themselves

The fundamentals of reducing call volume depend on inspiring your customer to find call answering services and resolve issues independently. This is about providing efficient and effective self-service options that complement human support.

1. Developing Comprehensive Knowledge Bases & FAQs:

An adequate knowledge base goes beyond your accumulation of data and FAQ’s. This is strategically organized, with information stored and designed for easy navigation. Here are the steps:

• Keyword Optimization: You should use relevant keywords, and your customers are expected to search to find out from exact match search results. Google Keyword Planner or SEMRUSH provides you with such facilities to conduct similar keyword research, and help you to identify the most common search terms related to your products or services. 
• Logical Structure: Organize your information logically using categories, sub-categories, and clear search terms. You need to think about users’ journeys and identify their pain points. 
• Multiple Content Version: Craft content for videos, images, and infographics to increase the customers’ understanding and engagement. Visual aids are often more effective than lengthy text explanations. 
• Regular Updates: Consistency is the key to enhancing your knowledge base. You must use learning platforms to apply regular updates and adjust to the current situation. You must schedule your regular reviews and updates as per your customer pain points to ensure accuracy and relevance. 
• Use Multiple Formats: Besides providing offers, you can also offer multiple formats notifications or information like articles, FAQs, or tutorials to fill up your customers’ different learning styles and choices.  

2. Implementing Intelligent Chatbots & Virtual Assistants:

Chatbots are now advanced AI-powered, and you can handle critical inquiries and understand natural language that you learn from your past interactions. Effective chatbot implementation requires:

• Clear Goals and Scope: Define what your chatbot integration can achieve. You can focus on common questions and tasks that can be easily automated. 
• Consistent Integration: Integrate your chatbot into your website, mobile app, and other communication channels that have easy access to your customers.  
• Human Handover: You need to provide a smooth handover to human management when the chatbot’s use is limited. You don’t need to frustrate your customer with endless loops or noncooperative responses. 
• Continuous Monitoring and Improvement: Track your chatbot performance and analyze users’ interactions to help you improve accuracy and efficiency.

3. Optimizing Website/App User Experience for Information Discovery:

A well-designed website or app can easily provide access to your customers to find the information they need. This involves:

• Clear Direction: You must ensure the provided website or app is easy to navigate. Provide clear menus, prominent search bars, and logical page layouts. 
• User-Friendly Design: Use a clean and simple design and avoid overwhelming customers with heavy information or complex interfaces. 
• Accessibility: Design your accessibility to ensure users can easily access your website or app, depending on their abilities.
• Search Function Optimization: Implement a powerful search strategy that provides your users to find their queries easily. 

4. Utilizing Automated Status Updates (e.g., Service Outage Pages):

To utilize automated updates, you can proactively manage your customers’ expectations and reduce all call volumes during service disruption or planned maintenance. The effective implementation of your services includes: 

• Multiple Communication Channels: You need to use different communication platforms like email, SMS, messaging, website banners, app notifications with social media post updates to reach out to the broader audiences. 
• Clear and Concise Messaging: Create a schedule-based calendar for sending messages to your audiences that contain clear, concise, and easy-to-understand for the sake of updating your products or seasonal offers. 
• Regular Updates: Provide regular updates to your customers regarding any updates or resolving issues. Also, keep your customer informed to prevent speculations and reduce their anxieties. 
• Dedicated Status Pages: For any large-scale disruption or planned maintenance, you need a dedicated page that is convenient to provide comprehensive updates. This can provide an overview of the situation, including FAQs and contact information for further updates. 

Proactive Customer Communication: Setting Expectations and Staying Ahead of the Curve

High-volume calls cause customers to experience a crisis when waiting for a call to be received while your call centers are optimizing. In this case, a proactive communication strategy is your secret weapon for minimizing the impact of those important call penetrations. Top-performing call centers aren’t reacting to the calls, and they’re using proactive communication to manage customer expectations. Here’s how you can use the same strategy to manage customer expectations:

1. Using Outbound Notifications for Known Issues or Updates:

You don’t need to keep your customer waiting in a queue using outbound notifications to keep your customer in the loop. You can use multi-channel approaches that include:

• SMS: This is the perfect option for your customer; it is brief and urgent, and the customer is more likely to get your response through SMS than an email. 
• Email: This is ideal for more detailed explanations with urgent updates. You can provide relevant link resources, FAQs, or status pages to the email you are sending. 
• In-App Messages: You can use a mobile app and customize in-app notifications to reach users directly.

Expert Tips: The best practices for proactive customer communication methods are: Personalization is optimizing messages as much as possible to specific customers. Be transparent and aware of any issues that may have potential impacts. Provide regular updates on the progress of resolving issues. Includes a clear CTA and link to specific page status, like FAQ contact form.

2. Setting Clear Expectations on Website and Social Media During Peak Times:

During important periods of high-volume calls, like end-of-month billing, product launches, and major promotions, you need to manage your customers proactively.

• Website Prominence: Place your clear messages on your website homepage, including relevant pages providing customers with potential waiting times, and arrange alternative support channels like email, chat, and online support ticket system. 
• Social Media Engagement: Also you can use social media platforms to address the most common questions and concerns. Respond to your client promptly to any queries and keep your customer updated on relevant issues. 

Tips for Effective Messages:   Use an appreciation message (like, “We appreciate your patience!”) while your customers are waiting during a high volume of calls.  For troubleshooting or page updates, keep informed using a status page like “We’re experiencing technical difficulties.”  During the waiting time of your customer, you can use messages like “Our team is working hard to solve your problem as quickly as possible.”

Reactive Strategies: Efficiently Managing the Influx

When proactive strategies are swelling, then reactive strategies come into play. These are the tools and techniques to use in managing effectively during the rush of callings and minimizing wait times to keep your agent happy. 

Optimizing Call Routing & Distribution: Getting Calls to the Right People Fast

Efficient call routing and distribution are about getting your calls to the right agent with the right skills as fast as possible. Here are the steps involved: 

1. Implementing/Tuning Automatic Call Distributor (ACD) Systems:

The ACD system is a core part of any efficient call center. It automatically routes your incoming calls based on your pre-defined rules and agent availability. Regular tuning and optimizing strategies are essential to maximizing efficiency:

• Agent Skill-Based Routing: You need to configure your ACD to route all calls based on your agent skills and expertise. To direct the calls to the right person, you need specialized knowledge. 
• Call Queuing: To manage waiting calls, you need to implement effective call queuing systems when call agents are busy. Also, you can utilize automated features like virtual call queuing and call options to avoid customers’ long hold times. 
• Real-Time Monitoring: Use a dashboard based on real-time monitoring to track call volume, agency availability, and length of queue. Utilizing the system, you can identify the bottleneck and make adjustments. 

2. Utilizing Skills-Based Routing (SBR): Matching Calls to Expertise

Skill-based routing (SBR) has significant changes from essential agent skill-based routing. As per SBR analysis, your callers may demand the best call agent before connecting. This intelligent routing connected callers in the following steps:

• Integrating with your CRM: CRM systems store ample information about your customer and their past interactions. SBR can optimize that data to detect the caller’s needs and route them accordingly. Likewise, if your customer has consistently contacted support about billing issues, the SBR system will prioritize your caller to route their call to an agent specializing in billing.
• Customizing IVR Input: An Advanced IVR system can gather information from your callers through voice recognition or menu selections. IVR uses this information through the SBR system to determine the exact agent. For example, if your caller selects “technical support” from the IVR menu, the system will route the call to a technical support agent.
• Predictive Routing: There are some advanced systems that can use predictive analytics to predetermine the callers’ needs based on historical data and call patterns. This approach reduces your customers’ waiting times. 

3. Designing Effective Interactive Voice Response (IVR) Menus (Avoiding Complexity):

If you have a poor IVR system, it can frustrate your customers and drive them to cancel their calls. So, you need to struggle for simplicity and clarity:

• Keep it Concise: Offer your customer the most essential options to avoid long, confusing menus with multiple options of sub-menus.
• Clear Prompts: You need to use clear and concise language in your prompts to avoid Specialized dialect or ambiguous terminology. 
• Voice Recognition: Consider integrating your voice recognition technology to navigate the menus using voice commands. This significantly improves the user experience.
• Regular Testing and Optimization: Regularly test your IVE systems to detect the core areas for improvement. Also, track the metrics like rates of discontinuation and average navigation time to optimize menu efficiency. 

Managing Call Queues Effectively: Keep Your Customers (and Agents) Happy

Nobody likes to stay being held on. If you manage call queues poorly, it can be a recipe for frustrated customers and stressed-out agents. You can transform your call queue from a source of anxiety into a well-oiled machine. 

Offering Callback Options (Virtual Hold/Queue): Set an option for your caller instead of listening to elevator music for an unspecified duration; your customer can enter their number and receive a call back when an agent is available. This is the magic of using high-tech to hold virtually and call back to the waiting caller. This is called a “win-win” situation as it avoids customers’ endless waiting time. You can use multiple call center platforms, such as Five9, Genesys Cloud, and Talkdesk, which offer robust callback features.

Providing Accurate Estimated Wait Times (EWT): You don’t need to leave your customers in limbo; you can give them an exact time estimation of how long they actually need to wait. Your modest projections and exceeding expectations is a better strategy than the reverse. Callers’ waiting time is always breeds frustration. This requires a strong queue management system that can accurately predict wait times based on your current call volumes and agent availability. 

Tiered Support Structures: All callers’ queries aren’t equal, and some caller requires senior agents to handle calls efficiently. Therefore, you need to implement a tiered support structure that will relieve you from routing calls based on callers’ complex queries. A tiered support system improves your call-handling efficiency and ensures that calls are handled by an appropriately skilled agent. This approach often includes a combination of skilled-based routing with ACD systems and well-defined designated processes for advancing unresolved issues.

Improving Agent Efficiency During Calls: Empowering Your Team for Success 

During high-volume call-handling periods, you require a strategic focus on agent efficiency. Let’s explore some key strategies to handle your team and improve agent call efficiencies: 

Streamlining Call Scripts and Workflows: Efficient scripts considered clear and concise and guide agents through calls logically. This isn’t about robotic responses; it’s about providing a framework for consistent, effective communication. You may consider CRM platforms with integrated calling scripts featuring dynamic adjustments of the script based on customer history and content. These tools include Salesforce Service Cloud, Zendesk, and Freshdesk, which offer this functionality.

• Internal Knowledge Base: A well-organized and easily accessible knowledge base is essential. You need to consider using a dedicated knowledge base platform like GURU or Notion, which is integrated with your CRM.
• Linking CRM Data: Consistently, CRM Connection is important to your agent needs that has instant access to your customer history, previous interactions, and account details. This context provides you with personalized and efficient service that reduces repetitive questioning.

Reducing Average Handle Time (AHT) Without Sacrificing Quality: Average handle time (AHT) Reducing AHT is critical for efficiency but must be balanced against maintaining customer satisfaction.

• Targeted Training: You should invest in training programs that focus on efficient communication, active listening, and problem-solving techniques.
• Process Optimization: Regular review on refining your call handling process to identify and remove obstacles.
• Technology Upgrades: Explore your advanced tools, such as AI-powered features, which are available in platforms like  Amazon Connect and Google Cloud Contact Center AI. These platforms provide you with real-time assistance and information suggestions to your agents during calls. 

Improving First Call Resolution (FCR): When your ultimate goal is to resolve customer issues on the first contact, you can reduce call volumes by improving customer satisfaction and boosting agent morale. How you can achieve high FCR rates necessitates:

• Comprehensive Training: Organize your agents with the required knowledge and skills to address a wide range of customer issues.

• Effective Knowledge Management: You must have a sound knowledge base that is comprehensive and up-to-date and should provide your agents with the answers they need.

• Empower Agents: Provide the right authority to your agents in order to make decisions and resolve issues without requiring continuous supervisor approval. 

Leveraging Technology and Tools: Your Call Center’s Secret Weapon

You may have the right objectives to apply technology or implement technology or strategies, but your strategy may go down due to lack of proper application. Let’s explore how the tools can transform your call center into proper efficiency.

• Call Center Software( Cloud-Based vs. On-Premise): Let’s apply cloud-based solutions like Five9, Genesys Cloud, Talkdesk, and NICE inContact that offer scalability, flexibility and lower upfront costs. These tools are easier to set up and maintain, and they adapt consistently to changes in your call volumes. The best choice of your tools depends on your budget, IT structure, and long-term scalable needs. 
• CRM Integration (Context is King): The Proper application of a CRM tools is your goldmine using customer data uninterrupted integration with your call center software and tools. This facility provides your agent with instant access to customer history, purchase details, previous customer interactions, and support-giving records. You can use the personalized and efficient services testing popular CRMS like Salesforce, HubSpot, and Zoho, which integrate with many call center platforms.
• Workforce Management (WFM) tools for scheduling & forecasting: When you provide accurate forecasting, it is vital for your effective workforce management requirements. Workforce Management (WFM) tools like Calabrio, Verint, and Aspect can analyze your historical call data to predict future call volume that optimizes for scheduling and staffing levels. These tools also help you to manage agents’ schedules, track performance, and give insights to adequate coverage during peak periods. 
• Analytics and Reporting Dashboards (Data-Driven Decisions): A strong analytics dashboard can provide real-time insights into key performance indicators (KPIs) like average handle time (AHT), first call resolution (FCR), waiting times, and agent occupancy. This data provides you insights to identify basics and measure the effectiveness of your strategies and data-driven improvements. Many call center platforms use built-in analytics dashboards or integrate with business so that you can utilize tools with intelligence like Tableau or Power BI.
• AI-powered tools (Agent Assist, Sentiment Analysis): Using artificial intelligence is a new dimension for call centers. Your agent can take advantage of tools that provide real-time suggestions and information to agents during calls and improve efficiency and accuracy. Customer sentiment analysis tools help to monitor customer calls to identify negative sentiment by which the supervisor can intervene and ease the situation.  AI-powered platforms are mainly Google Cloud Contact Center AI, and Amazon Connect offers these capabilities.
• Omnichannel Support Platforms (integrating chat, email, and social): If your customers become dissatisfied, they can interact across multiple channels like phone, email, chat, and social media. This omnichannel platform integrates channels into a single interface, providing a consistent customer experience. Call center agents handle these channels to inquire from a single dashboard and improve efficiency. 

Staffing and Supporting Your Team: The Human Element of Success

Effective workforce management is the key to success in handling a high volume of calls, ensuring both efficiency and well-being. 

Effective Workforce Management: More Than Just Numbers

Accurate forecasting and scheduling are the bases of effective workforce management. This is a strategic allocation of your resources to meet expected demand. 

• Accurate Forecasting and Scheduling: Utilizing workforce management (WFM) tools like those from Calabrio, Verint, or Aspect to analyze historical call data, predict future volume, and create optimized schedules. You need to incorporate real-time data feeds from your ACD to adjust staffing in response to unexpected tasks. Accurate forecasting minimizes understaffing and overstaffing, which leads to unnecessary labor costs. 
• Flexible Staffing Models: Inflexible staffing models become a disaster during fluctuating call volumes. Likewise, part-time agents provide a cost-effective source to supplement your full-time staff during peak hours. But temporary staff consider agencies to quickly scale your workforce during expected peaks or unexpected events. You can offer overtime opportunities to your existing staff to provide incentives during busy hours to boost your productivity.  
• Cross-Training Agents: A Versatile Team can provide you greater flexibility in routing calls and ensure your team can handle a broader range of inquiries. Besides, cross-trained agents provide you with redundancy and mitigate the impact of agent absences or unexpected spikes in specific types of calls. So, you need to consider creating training modules to focus on both hard skills (technical knowledge) and soft skills (communication, understanding, and mitigation strategies). 

Agent Training and Delegation: Your Team’s Superpower

If you invest in technology and optimized processes, you need to focus on the heart of your call center. Training delegation with well-trained agents is the secret weapon for handling high-volume calls effectively while maintaining a positive customer experience. 

Training on Handling Stressful Calls and Efficient Workflows: High-volume calls often become stressful to the agents. So, you need to train your agents with the skills to navigate these challenges effectively.

• Reducing Tension and Conflict Techniques: Train your agents on how to reduce tension-reducing techniques to handle customers’ discontent. Therefore, you need to role-play to practice these skills in a safe environment. Besides, you need to consider integrating your agents’ emotional intelligence training to build understanding and improve communication skills. 
• Efficient Workflows: Provide necessary training to the agents for efficient workflows, emphasizing clear communication, quick problem-solving, and effective use of available tools and resources. 
• Product Knowledge: When your agent moves to the market for customer managing, you must follow-up your agents’ comprehensive product knowledge. Product knowledge increases confidence to answer customers’ questions and resolve any issues quickly. Therefore, you need to provide necessary training modules or register on training platforms to keep training engaging and effective. 

Delegating Agents with Decision-Making Authority: While your agent leads to a high volume of calls, during this time, you need to authorize your agent to make decisions within defined parameters.

• Clear Guidelines and Protocols: Establish clear guidelines and protocols for delegating your agents to resolve common issues independently. These steps reduce dependency on supervisors and prepare your agents to focus on more complex issues.
• Decision-Making Authority: This step gives your agent more freedom to make decisions within the established procedures. Besides, authorization on decision-making builds your agent’s confidence and reduces frustration. 
• Feedback Mechanisms: To open your work environment, you need to nurture your agents to feel comfortable sharing feedback and suggestions for improvement. Regularly collect feedback and incorporate those suggestions or complaints into training programs for better workflows.

Providing Tools and Resources for Success: Train your agents with the right tools for the betterment of your business.

• Agent Desktop Optimization: Provide a high-configured & user-friendly desktop to your agent for easy access to all necessary tools and information. A well-configured desktop reduces wasted time and frustration. 
• Knowledge Base Access: Ensure easy access or permission to a comprehensive knowledge base platform that is ready to use during calls. This will reduce the need for your agents to search for information while conducting with your clients. 
• Real-time Support: You can provide available supervisory support to your agent for handling complex or accelerated calls. Having clear support builds your agent’s confidence and removes stress. 

Preventing Agent Burnout: Keeping Your Team Happy (and Productive)

According to customer demand, high-volume calls and tight deadlines can quickly lead to your agent losing their temper. But emotionally, losing your temper drains your business excessively from your bottom line. High turnover means constant recruitment, training, and onboarding costs—potentially flowing out your resources. So, you need to know how to keep your agent engaged, happy, and productive. 

1. Ensuring adequate breaks

If you think of mini-resets, which aren’t about bathroom trips and coffee refills. They’re not giving your agents time to relax and recharge. So, you need to encourage them to step away from the desks, stretch, and take a few deep breaths. Also, consider implementing your structured break times and encouraging short meditation or mindfulness exercises. Here, top-performing industries using tools like  Talkdesk and Five9 emphasize this in their agent wellness programs.

2. Supervisor Support and Coaching: More Than Just Monitoring:

Your regular one-on-one check-ins are essential, and performance reviews also involve listening to concerns, offering support, and providing constructive feedback. Likewise, your supervisor should be like a mentor and coach. Effective coaching strategies can help agents build their supervisor skills and confidence, reducing stress and increasing job satisfaction. Top companies like Genesys emphasize the clear importance of leadership training for supervisors to foster a supportive environment. 

3. Cultivating a Positive Work Environment: It’s More Than Just Perks:

You need to ensure a positive work environment goes beyond ping-pong tables and free snacks. This is about fostering a culture of teamwork, respect, and recognition. When you encourage collaboration that celebrates success (big or small) and actively work to address any conflicts or unfavorable. There are some companies like Aircall that are known for their focus on building strong team cultures to understand a positive ambiance directly impacts your agent’s prosperity. 

4. Recognition and Rewards: Show Your Appreciation:

Remember, simple and verbal acknowledgment of appreciation like “Thank You” is considered a powerful tool to recognize your agents with rewards against their hard work and dedication. This system can be more effective than awarding a gift card or even a paid day off. You should understand that the reward system is fair, transparent, and consistent. 

Monitoring, Measuring, and Continuous Improvement: the Data-driven Path to Call Center Excellence

You must implement strategies to handle a high call volume and agent breakdown. Now, this is essential for how you are aware of whether they’re working. This combines a system of monitoring, measuring, and continuous improvements. It’s not enough to think that you’re doing well; therefore, you need a data-optimized report to keep proof.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): Your Guiding Stars

There are several key metrics that provide you valuable insights into your call center’s performance. To track these, you should apply a KPI system to identify areas for taking action for improvement and measure the effectiveness of your strategies. Key elements for your consideration are: 

• Wait Time: You must track how long your caller spends to hold on. After waiting a long time, you must analyze how these issues directly impact your customer satisfaction, which can lead to frustration.
• Abandonment Rate: What percentage of callers hang up before connecting to an agent? Track and analyze how a high abandonment rate signals problems with wait time or call routing.
• First Call Resolution (FCR): You must use tools to generate data-optimized reports on what percentage of calls are resolved at the beginning of attempts. A low FCR rate suggests your agents’ knowledge gaps or using inadequate tools.
• Average Handling Time (AHT): Track and measure how long your agents’ calls typically last. If there is a high rate of AHT that focuses on your inefficient processes or insufficient agent training, 
• Customer Satisfaction (CSAT): This is one of the most vital factors in finding insights on how satisfied your customer is with your agents’ interactions. Low rates of CSAT scores are pointed to the areas of your agents’ improvement needs or service processes. 
• Agent Occupancy: What percentage of time are your agents actively handling calls? A high rate of occupancy might indicate your understaffing, while low occupancy could suggest inefficiencies. 

Analyzing Call Data: Uncovering Hidden Trends

You need to collect and analyze call recordings using software and analytics dashboards to identify trends and patterns. Your specific agents may consistently handle calls more efficiently than others. In this case, you need to trace the recurring issues that are causing longer call times or lower CSAT scores. Your understanding of these trends helps you analyze pain point root causes and develop targeted solutions. 

Gathering Feedback: The Voice of the Customer (and Agent)

When data isn’t the only solution to get the full picture, you must gather feedback both from customers and agents. Regular customer surveys can provide you with the core areas of need for improvement in your services and processes. In this case, the agent’s feedback helps you identify workplace challenges and areas where support is inevitable. Besides, a regular customer feedback cycle ensures you’re addressing concerns and making changes based on real-world experiences, which aren’t limited to digits only. 

Regular Review and Adjustment: The Continuous Improvement Cycle

Collecting reviews and adjustments with the operational process is an ongoing process. Regularly review your KPIs and analyze call data to gather feedback. You need to use this information to bring change to core strategies that help you set up current processes and continuous efforts on improvement. The purpose of the regular review is to create a self-correcting system that is accustomed to changing circumstances and consistently delivers excellent customer service. This step-by-step approach can be collected with data and feedback, which are key to your long-term business success.  

Conclusion: Finding the Balance

Managing high call volumes effectively balances your business and finds the sweet spot between efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and employee betterment. You should proactively address your potential challenges by optimizing technology and delegating your agents to consistently monitor your performance. 

Do you have a lack of time to spend analyzing your agents’ performance due to significant strategy setting and execution? CallingAgency provides the right solution to resolve the issues. You’ll get both expert and experienced online assistants to support you in tracking, monitoring, and analyzing data-optimized reports. Besides, our skilled resources can get original feedback from your agents and customers to make any changes needed. This will increase your business efficiency and achieve customer satisfaction and loyalty. 

Book a free consultation with CallingAgency today to discuss your specific needs and start optimizing your call handling.