How Call Monitoring Benefits the Customer Service Department

In today's digital age, businesses offer their clients a wide variety of online services — from shopping to financial transactions. But when it comes to customer service, a majority of consumers still prefer to contact businesses over the phone.

A survey on customer contact preferences shows that a whopping 60% of respondents prefer phone calls over other means of contact. This is followed by email and physical store visits at 16% and 15%, respectively. So, clearly, there's still plenty to be gained from customer service calls.

One way to get the most out of these calls is to implement call monitoring. Here are four ways this feature can heighten your company's customer service:

Customer support teams can leverage call monitoring to improve your business' caller experience.

Reduce bottlenecks and iron out inefficiencies

Evaluating the customer service department becomes much easier with call monitoring because it allows executives to listen to ongoing calls and review previous calls. This allows you to conduct in-depth reviews on the department's current performance.

Once you've found where the bottlenecks are forming, your in-house management analyst can start reworking the process to increase efficiency. As one of the leading careers in business data analytics, management analysts have strong organizational skills and are adept at data visualization. By analyzing the data extrapolated from customer service lines, they can work towards optimizing the department's service model, making recommendations based on facts and hard numbers.

For example, there are cases where automated customer service can actually reduce business performance and deter clients from reaching out again. That said, it would be best to either optimize your automated system or do away with it altogether.

Yay.com’s IVR call menus are just one tool that your company can use to improve call routing efficiency while boosting the caller experience for your customers. Call monitoring makes it clear where your callers are dropping out of call queues or IVR menus, providing crucial insight into the next steps your business can take to maximise conversion.

Allow managers to quickly step in for employees who are struggling

Outside of internal bottlenecks, call monitoring can also be useful in providing real-time support to customer service representatives. The whisper feature lets you talk to the representative without the customer hearing you. This comes in very handy when your employee is having trouble with a query. It's also a great way to offer a few words of encouragement to them.

What’s more, if the customer opens with a difficult topic that your customer service representative isn't qualified to handle, you can use the join or barge features to jump straight into the call and communicate with the caller directly. This function is especially useful for dealing with volatile customers as it lets you step in directly to defuse the situation.

Call monitoring features like the Whisper function empower supervisors to advise, support and guide colleagues.

Gain real-time customer feedback

Another benefit of call monitoring is that it allows both customer service staff and company executives to gain real-time feedback from clients. Customer feedback is crucial data as it helps businesses determine how customers perceive the business and how else they can improve their services. Feedback is also an avenue to gain insights into current consumer and market trends.

With call monitoring, the time it takes to act on this feedback is significantly reduced. Thus, you can make decisions for the business at a much faster rate. And in the case of negative feedback or customer concerns, executives can jump into the call using the join feature and address a client's concerns immediately.

Identify areas of improvement for individual employees

Once you have a sizable number of recordings in your database, you can use that information to pinpoint skill gaps and areas of improvement for individual employees. Hand the information to your human resources manager and have them study all the calls; this allows your HR department to optimize their training programs, ensuring they fit the workforce's current skills and capabilities.

For instance, some customer service employees might need help with their general communication skills, while others might need pointers on how to deal with difficult customers. This information allows for a more focused training program, as opposed to one based on generalities and guesswork.

By implementing these data-driven training decisions, your business performance is more likely to improve. This also increases employee engagement as it signals to your staff that you're paying attention to them and are interested in developing their skills.

Customer service is an essential facet of any business. It's a direct line of communication with one's clients and can provide a wealth of data to increase business performance. Thus, it's best to incorporate systems that can actively improve the customer service department and, in this case, call monitoring more than fits the bill.

Content intended only for the use of Yay.com

Written by Alicia Kane