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15 Essential Call Center Metrics Your Business Must Measure

Collecting, analyzing and reporting information regarding the performance of the business is significant for organizational growth. Taking decisions that are critical to the business needs a closer look into each segment. In the customer service industry, businesses must track and improve the essential call center metrics to understand where the business is heading to and what action plan is required to achieve better results.

“Not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be counted counts.” -Albert Einstein

With a lot of things in hand, call center managers often juggle between what to take up first while monitoring contact center KPIs. The ultimate goal is to bring upon a data-driven change that can lead to delivering a positive customer experience. Happy and content customers can do wonders in branding but a bad word of mouth can tarnish the brand image.

If you are managing a call center or working in one and are facing difficulty in what to go after first here is the list of call center metrics that are critical for the health of your contact center:

Agent Availability

Agent availability refers to the time call center agents were available to take calls during their shifts, including the time spent on handling calls and the time spent waiting for calls to arrive. It is also known as Adherence as it implies how well agents adhere to their shift schedules and is usually expressed as a percentage of logged on time.

Average Handling Time (AHT)

Average handling time (AHT) is the sum of the average talk time, hold time and the average wrap-up time for a specified period. Call centers should ensure to reduce AHT for improved agent productivity.

Answered Calls Ratio

It is the number of calls that arrive at the automatic call distributor (ACD) and are answered by an agent. The call center SLA for answered calls is 95% or more of offered calls.

Agent Talk Time

It is one of the crucial call center metrics and considers the time in seconds an agent takes to talk to the customer, from answering a call to the caller hanging up, but excluding any hold time.

Call Abandonment Rate

An abandoned call is a call or other type of contact initiated to a contact center that gets ended before any conversation occurs. Calls that arrive at the ACD but terminate before an agent has answered. The call center SLA for abandoned calls is 5% or less of offered calls. Call center managers must take steps to eliminate call abandonment

Customer Effort Score

Customer Effort Score (CES) is a type of customer satisfaction metric used to measure the degree of ease the customer felt they had to expend to resolve their issue or to use the product or service. The purpose of such surveys for organizations is to evaluate how likely the customers are to continue using and paying for their product.

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

It is a customer satisfaction survey methodology to measure customer’s satisfaction with a business, purchase, or interaction.

First Call Resolution (FCR)

First call resolution is a call center metric that monitors the quality of service that customers are receiving by counting the number of times the customers’ needs are addressed the first time they call in, thereby eliminating the need for the customer to follow up with a second call. Higher FCR helps in delighting customers.

Handled the First-Time

The proportion of calls that are handled by call center agents without the need to transfer the call to the service department. If an agent refers to the service department for advice but retains the call then this is counted as first-time resolved.

Lost Calls

This call center metric helps to track calls that arrive at the ACD and were not answered by an agent.

On-Hold Time

On-Hold Time is monitored by supervisors with a detailed agent level and queue level real-time monitoring to have an insight into how long the average caller waits on hold before they are connected to a call agent.

Peak Hour Traffic

Peak hour traffic is the time of the day when there are maximum calls to be handled by agents. This can be determined and identified with the help of real-time monitoring and the agent allocation can be planned to handle the work in the busiest hour of the day.

Response Time

This call center metric helps to measure the time it takes an agent in a call center to respond to interactions/tickets that were handled when they arrive.

Service Level Agreements (SLA)

Service Level Agreement specifies the time limit within which a ticket has to be replied to and resolved based upon the priority of the ticket.

Wrap-Up Time (or Wrap Time)

Wrap Time is the time spent by an agent doing After-Call Work once they have concluded an interaction such as putting disposition codes to take note of interaction outcome and follow-ups.

Measuring and tracking call center metrics in real-time can improve call center performance enormously. But the key lies in using the right and tools. If you are exploring the call center software solutions that can help you measure the just-in-time data and support you to do the call center performance analysis then check out Ameyo’s call center reporting and monitoring dashboards.

Everything You Need To Know About An Outbound Call Center

Outbound calls effort may take longer to reflect in your business if you are not well equipped with the right tools to leverage your outbound calling strategy. Solve your customer’s problems and convert your prospects into leads with a powerful Outbound Call Center Solution. Make each call count with the following technologies and embed them today in your Outbound Call Center.

What is Outbound Call Center?

An outbound call center is setup to reach out to customers and prospects for proactive support, telesales, or collections. The premise of an outbound call center is to dial out rather than receiving inbound customer queries. An outbound call center helps you manage high outbound call volumes and ensure high customer outreach.

For smooth Outbound operations, a business needs an Outbound Call Center Software that will help achieve a high call connect rate and increase outbound call coverage. Managing Agent productivity, compliance, and reporting are other challenges for outbound call centers.

How to Connect More and Devise an effective Outbound Calling Strategy

Process-Based Dialing Strategies

The dialing algorithm depends on your business-specific requirements like reminding customers of installment payments. Based on the preset parameters, predictive dialer smartly predicts the agent availability using the historical data such as average call handling time and connects the call to the agents when they are available in the queue. The answering machine will detect the human voice, a busy tone, etc. and the call is transferred to agents only when the call is answered by a human being.

Scheduling Call Back

For insurance premium reminders or credit card bills customers would want to be notified in prior time. Customers feel more valued when they are listened to and you can ensure that by scheduling a call back for them and notify them for the bill payment.

Agents cannot keep track of 100 calls at one given time, with the callback feature, the dialer will automatically place a call to the customers at a scheduled time thus improving call productivity.

DNC Compliance:

Exclusion Management should be followed to avoid legal trouble. The do-not-call feature removes all DNC numbers from the campaign to ensure that the DNC list is filtered out from the lead list. Agents do not have to spend time qualifying unproductive leads.

Framing Reports & Analytics

Supporting your business strategy with data-driven reports will prepare you to make well-informed decisions. With an outbound calling software, you get the flexibility to derive different reports like Agent Productivity Report, Call Details Report, Call Abandoned Report, etc. to analyze the performance of agents and call quality assurance.

With these reports, supervisors can also identify the call pattern, customer behavior, customer satisfaction rate, etc. and modify their outbound calling strategy.

Best Practices for an Outbound Call Center

Integrate to Yield Results

Place value in your customer’s journey to increase the efficiency of your outbound call center. Integrate your outbound contact center software with in-house or third-party CRM to produce the best results. Allow your agents to access customer’s data on a single screen while making calls. Agents can have more personalized interaction when given prior information about the customer’s behavioral journey.

Assure Quality with Call Recording

How do your agents qualify a lead and where they are lacking? Measure call quality with real-time call monitoring tools and help your agents to resolve better. Managers and Supervisors can listen to live calls and recorded calls to monitor and improvise the lead qualifying algorithm.

These calls can also be used to define the call quality metrics and for training a fresh batch of agents.

Collect Feedback

Driving customer loyalty is an often missed but important aspect of outbound call center services. Do not assume, ask. Let your customers speak for your services, ask for the feedback, and analyze the trends that your customers follow. Dedicate a team to monitor customer feedback and proactively resolve the issues, make sure to not repeat them. Satisfied customers will become the promoters of your brand, so you need to invest in improvising their journey by collecting feedback and acting upon it.

Do Not Miss Any Lead

Are your keeping a track of missed calls? If not, start today. Define your business hours and get notified of missed calls that landed in your system during non-business hours. Agents can schedule a follow-up for such leads to engage with them and convert them at the earliest.

Key Outbound Call Center Metrics that Should be Tracked

Measuring the key performance indicators is important for any business to keep the business objectives at the forefront. These KPIs should be carefully monitored to achieve business goals.

Average Handling Time

It is an important and rewarding metric. Who doesn’t want to close the sale in the first contact? While First Call Resolution does not come easy for certain business types, it helps in boosting the sales revenue drastically. Identifying trends that work for your business is important, incentivize this metric to see the results for yourself.

Conversion Rate

Higher your conversion rate, the better. But, if not, check where you are lacking. Your agents might be handling more number of calls but are failing in closing the sale, hence cost per lead increases. Closely analyze the conversion rate because your business’s revenue is directly dependent on this metric. You can analyze the reason for failure by closely monitoring the behavioral pattern.

First Call Resolution Rate

It is an important and rewarding metric. Who doesn’t want to close the sale in the first contact? While First Call resolution does not come easy for certain business types, it helps in boosting the sale revenue drastically. Identifying trends that work for your business is important, incentivize this metric to see the results for yourself.

Call Abandoned Ratio

What if callers are answering the calls but are not connected to live agents quickly? They abandon the call and you might lose a potential customer. Set your routing parameters such that calls are connected to live agents and customers do not have to hold for a long time.

Choose the right outbound call centre software for your business, increase efficiency, and make most of every single customer that arrives at your door. Are you there yet? Improve your call center operations with Ameyo’s Outbound Call Centre Software and voice your message smartly get Ameyo pricing details now!

Ameyo Celebrates One Team One Goal at Sales Meet 2018

Helping our customers and partners walk one step ahead in the Customer Experience game, Ameyo has come up with innovative ideas in the Sales Meet’18. The Co-founder and CEO, Bishal Lachhiramka, translates ‘One Team One Goal’ into three pillars of Trust, Ownership and Respect while addressing the teams to achieve the shared vision of the entire organisation.

Sachin Bhatia, Co-founder and Global Sales & Marketing Head, delivers the ‘Why and How of Sales Strategies’ to capacitate the future of sales drive.

While communicating the best sales practices, he discusses 5 types of salespersons:

The Relationship Builder
The Reactive Problem Solver
The Hard Worker
The Lone Wolf
The Challenger

The challenger being on the top, seeks to change the world with a different view and knows the art of winning because he asks questions and tailor his answers to suitably fit customer’s needs. “A successful salesperson is the challenger who challenges the customers and solve their problems”, says Sachin Bhatia in conversation with Team Ameyo.

While building on the initiative of One Team One Goal, we have come up with key essentials to craft a new world of customer engagement. Striving to smoothen the on-boarding of partners, we are launching Partner Enablement program that will leverage the partners to be market ready.

Our partners serve as the cornerstone from on-boarding to live operations to ensuring that our business is provided with the right resources for the growth and success. This program is designed for partner focussed delivery and to help them scale higher in shorter time. Quarterly product updates and tech training on know-how of the products is enabled to garner faster traction and business building.

Staging our product stability and delivery efficiency, we have come across many challenges and to accomplish our goals, Ameyo’s team is dedicated towards on-time delivery of our products and ensure a smooth experience for our customers.

What are we changing for people? In a live discussion with International Sales Team across regions, Sachin Bhatia introduced the team to business insights. Does customers always know their requirement? How to add insight to customer’s business? Understanding customer’s business and asking questions to provide customized message and resonate with the customer. Drives customer focused sales.

In a learning graph, the customer would take away home an exciting and meaningful experience if you “Change your words to change your world”.

Adding new partners and logos to our business, we have engaged with different teams to drive sales orientation and lead the buying process proactively. “Computing our goals for 2018, we have signed an agreement with WhatsApp which would allow us to roll out WhatsApp for Business APIs on WhatsApp’s behalf globally”, explained Rahul Zutshi, Director of Marketing & Strategy, Ameyo.

Procuring to our existing customers and initiating new business globally, we are ready to sail the game for WhatsApp Integration for non-promotional updates. Customer Service notifications are initiated by WhatsApp and our sales team is armed to lead the WhatsApp queries widely.

Prince Singh, Associate VP at Ameyo promised product stability to improve UX and surpass the expectations of our customers as his team aligns with the current customer demands.

To effectively move towards the agenda of the year, Ameyo’s team works for Change Management wherein we are perpetually aligning our goals with the business needs of our customers and updating our products. From individual’s transition to the organisational changes, we intend to meet the outcome of delivering better customer experience.

Enclosing the Sales Meet’18, we met the people behind the scenes. Not forgetting the support team that handles all our customer operations at the back end because great things are never done by one person, they are the result of teamwork. Bringing all the teams together and gearing up for 2019, we, at Ameyo, have built the three pillars of Trust, Ownership and Respect across teams.

What Is An IVR and Why Business Needs Smart IVR System

Bad customer service experiences tend to stay with you for long and leaves a negative impression of the brand which affects your next decision like whether to interact with that brand in future. I had a similar experience while shopping online for gifts this Christmas season. To ensure that all the gifts reach on time I placed the orders way in advance, but still faced late delivery issues, I understand it’s the peak season and a slight delay was expected. But, things got worst when I called the customer service of the e-commerce giant whom I trusted with all my festive gifts. I was stuck at the initial customer service IVR which was unable to lead me anywhere to resolve my queries! Brands need to understand that an IVR system is supposed to help customers and not spoil their service experience.

An IVR might be the first touchpoint in a brand’s customer service cycle, and if it is not managed in the right way then it will simply to push away the customers because today’s customers want instant gratification and will not take delay or errors for granted. So, now the onus lies on the businesses to take charge and ensure they facilitate a better experience for their customers.

If you are in a business-to-customer (B2C) domain, then this blog might help you understand the basic anatomy of an IVR system and how you can optimize your IVR solution to deliver a better customer experience instead of driving them away from your business.

Check out the infographic, how does IVR work?

What is an IVR and Types of IVR

As per the simple definition, interactive voice response (IVR) is a technology that allows a computer to interact with humans through the use of voice and DTMF tones input using a keypad. An IVR system interacts with callers, gathers information and routes calls to the appropriate recipient.

A simple IVR system for call center seamlessly routes your customers to the right agent or department using customizable call flow mechanisms. There can be different types of IVRs used in a call center :

IVR for Self-Service

Intelligent IVR System, also called auto-attendant or automated voice, allows businesses to service high call volumes at a lower cost. It can identify & segment callers, and resolve their query without transferring to a live agent. Calls are transferred to live agents only when the caller is unable to find the information they require, helping call center agents be more productive & effective by giving them more time to deal with complex interactions.

Hosted IVR

An IVR solution installed on a hosted software platform that allows businesses to access the IVR application on the internet. This enables the organization to deliver 24/7 customer service, even after office hours. Having a hosted IVR system is the best way for enterprises to gain loyalty and improve satisfaction.

Agent-Assisted IVR

An agent-assisted IVR solution helps the contact center to optimize the cost of operations and along with delivering consistent customer service. The agent can dynamically direct pre-recorded phrases to initiate a dialog with the customer, without the customer knowing an agent is involved. This helps in eliminating customer frustrations caused by complex-structured menu options.

Route each customer call to the best-suited agent with IVR System

Why IVR System Is Important
For Business

Interactive Voice Response software has used pre-recorded voice prompts and menus to present information and options to callers, and touch-tone telephone keypad entry to gather responses. Modern IVR solutions also enable input and responses to be gathered via spoken words with voice recognition. Enterprises are increasingly looking for an IVR service provider that helps them in managing their Inbound and Outbound call centers to reduce the cost of common sales, service, collections, inquiry, and support calls to and from their company.

Take a note of the following business benefits of an IVR system-

First Call Resolution

Companies need to implement intelligent call routing to the best-qualified agent to ensure the customer’s query is resolved at the earliest. Do not make your customers wait on the IVR, rather design your IVR flow in a smart manner to minimize customer wait time by expediting the query resolution.

24*7 Customer Service

The primary purpose of an IVR is to ensure that customers are attended to even if the human agents are not available due to time constraints. Smart IVR systems let you play a pre-recorded message on off-days to allow self-service for the customers.

Handle High Call Volume

A smart IVR system facilitates designing effective IVR workflows to streamline the calls to enable seamless customer support and reduce customer waiting time to a great extent keeping in mind the call center resource availability.

Handle Multilevel IVR

An intelligent IVR system is one that allows multi-level flow in the IVR. Using multiple pre-recorded messages companies can ensure the customer is routed to the right agent for a specific product or process-related queries without any need for human assistance.

Automation of Operations

An IVR is essential to automate the mundane customer queries resolution to free-up the agents to focus on solving the priority issues. This increases agent productivity and improves customer support and satisfaction.

If your customers are abandoning the calls due to inefficient or complex IVR, find out how Ameyo can help to design a smart IVR flow with ease.

How To Design Smooth Customer Journey With Omnichannel Contact Center

Delivering impressive customer service is better said than done, yet organizations are leaving no stone unturned to provide a memorable customer experience by smoothening the customer journey for each individual. One bad experience can have a far-reaching impact on the brand image and hence, organizations cannot afford to compromise on service delivery.

Providing seamless customer service becomes more challenging with the complexity of merging data from multiple channels and operational systems into a centralized system to give a single unified view of the entire customer journey.

Another challenge in managing multiple customer touch points across channels is when customers transition between channels. It’s common that a customer reaches out a brand via multiple channels like phone, email or chat for a single transaction. For customers, it’s a single conversation and they get irritated if they have to repeat everything and start from scratch at each interaction point. This might get more complex if multiple agents are interacting with the same customer for the same issue. So it becomes more crucial for brands than ever to manage the customer journey in true omnichannel way.

Implementing an omnichannel contact center solution can be the first step towards delivering 360 degree customer experience and ensuring a smooth customer journey. An omnichannel contact center software helps organization to achieve the followings:

Customer Journey Mapping

An intelligent omnichannel contact center solution maps the entire customer journey to get a complete view of your customer’s interactions and preserves the context of interactions throughout the conversation. It also unifies multiple related interactions into one conversation while maintaining the context of customer query. This improves the speed and quality of customer services delivered by the organization.

Single Customer View

Organizations using the dynamic omnichannel cloud contact center software track multple customer touchpoints across the journey with a single view of customer data and activities, and arm their agents to fetch customer information with one click while responding to customer queries. Single screen for all the customer related data helps agents to understand the context of customer issues better and enables the agent to deliver personalized service.

Automated Operations

When organizations implement the right omnichannel contact center solution, they can be rest assured of smartly automating operations to ensure continuous conversations across multiple channels. Firstly, organizations can ensure a quick resolution through smartly auto-routing incoming interactions from different channels to the right agent based on various criteria like agent’s skill, workload, customer category, priority or persona. Secondly, setting automation rules based on event and time-related triggers can help in automating an action like conversation assignment to an agent, send notification or email, etc.

Let us know what are the other issues you are facing in managing your omnichannel contact center to design smooth customer journey in the comment section below.

How To Deliver Great Customer Experience With Automatic Call Distributor

Are you struggling to deliver seamless customer experience? Do your customers find it difficult to reach out to your best-skilled agents? How you can make sure that your customers are reaching the right agent every time they place a call? With Automatic Call Distribution mechanism, you can provide ease of use to the customers while routing them to the most equipped agents in the queue.
Are you hustling to modernize your Contact Center Software? Not only the customers, but ACD also helps elevate the satisfaction level of the agents because guess what, they are not burdened with more number of calls. ACD is a tailor-made solution for your call center software to provide best in class support to the customers.
Customers do not want to wait in the queue for hours and repeat themselves multiple times. Streamline communications and let your customers place their faith in your business while you deliver the support that they are seeking.

First thing first, What is ACD?

Struggle no more because ACD works on routing logic based on the area code, office hours and availability of most equipped agents in the queues. Yes, ACD comes to rescue for the big problems like high call volume, agents being offline and persona-based calling.
Help customers help them with the options of self-service and let them reach the right department directly. Do you often feel that you are repeating the same answer 100 times a day? You can eliminate the repetitive tasks by automated IVR response for FAQs.
Have you explored these features to make your call center a perfect fit for the industry?

Skill-Based Call Routing

Do you often observe that your calls for a lost debit card land into the IT department? Yes, you have a real problem if you are losing customers because calls are directed to random departments.
With Automatic Call Distributor in place, you can define your own rules and ensure that a call landing in your system from Japan meets the top skilled agent who is fluent in the Japanese language. Decide how and to whom you want to route the incoming calls and create your own routing logic with CRM data, IVR selection, business hours and agent’s skills to optimize each caller’s experience.

Reduced Wait Time

Customers do not wish to wait when they are placing an order for food delivery. You know hunger waits for no one. Increase call response with ACD and do not keep your VIP customers waiting for long in the queue.
Increase customer satisfaction with ACD and prioritize your customers on the basis of High-Value callers. Provide faster response by assigning such customers to contact center agents without any delay.

Cost Reduction

Are you investing a big number for calling operations? With a faster response rate and first call resolution, the time taken in handling a call reduces by a large number.
Solve customer’s query without transferring the call to other departments and hence reduce cost-per-call. Design your routing rules with IVR in place and experience for yourself the difference in cost investment.

Call Back Algorithm

How good would it be if your customers were given the option of talking to the same agent they spoke to earlier?
If Simon requested a refund on the canceled order, he wishes to take a follow up with the same agent to avoid any miscommunication. That’s where ACD comes in the picture, it notifies the agents for the call back requests immediately and agents could easily reach customers in the given time frame.

Track Missed Calls

You have confined business hours but your customers want a constant support 24*7. Would you have your customers lose faith in you or provide them with an option of voicemail?
Do you have a client base across geographies? Yes, you need to be present all the time and you can forward your customers to voicemail. Your agents will get a recorded message as soon as they log in their systems and you will not miss out on your customers. Customers really like to be valued and there’s your key to ensure that.

Deliver the experience that your customers want and maximize the customer satisfaction score with smart routing algorithm. Channelize your sources and integrate ACD with IVR that delivers highly responsive customer service.

Helpdesk Automation: The Next Big Thing in Ticket Management

In today’s technology-driven world, people expect no less than 100% perfection in their lives as technology has changed the needs and wants of customers. Customers demand speed and precision in everything around them. Now customers not only crave for a 30 minutes delivery for their Pizza but they seek hyper-sonic fulfillment for all of their wants. In this dynamic arena, we observe businesses competing for faster delivery options, quick payment options, and what not to save customers’ time.

All of this has lead to a drastic change in call center software solutions and help desk software solutions. To let businesses sustain, automation has become a core component of the contact center infrastructure (CCI). This has changed the way customer engagement centers (CEC) work these days. It’s a prerequisite for a contact center solution to focus on automated efficiency so that the service agents put in less time on routine activities, and more time in enriching the customer experience, driving customer loyalty and broadening the lifetime value of their customer base.

In this age where automation is dominating the world, business workflows are being designed to run on an auto-pilot mode. Business workflows are the skeleton of any organization, hidden from the outside world but they make all the difference to how things turn out. The key to limit waste of human potential is by choosing the right processes to automate.

In customer service domain, helpdesk automation relieves customer service agents of monotonous repetitive customer service interactions, enables smart ticket assignment, manages SLA, automates follow-ups and streamlines the complete workflow.

How Ameyo Helps in Helpdesk Automation?

Ameyo helps in simplifying the complexities by letting the users create and customize the workflows for ticket resolution. Ameyo help desk software solution’s administrator UI has options to configure rules that function as its foundation building blocks in ticket management. They drive the time-bound and automated ticket distribution and assignment, SLA management, ticket escalations, and notifications handling for better ticket management. Ameyo’s rules engine understands your business hours and can be tailor-made for your business process flows.

Let Ticket Automatically Reach Its “Right Man”

Routing Tickets to the right team in right time increases credibility. It establishes a trust in customers that they are being heard. Ameyo’s Routing Rules distribute the tickets to the most suitable agent to handle the customer’s queries in hand following a stringent time frame.

Provide Agents a Bigger Picture With Intelligent Grouping

Customer Service personnel often struggle to get all the ticket data in one coherent view wherein customer’s related queries can be viewed in one screen. Ameyo’s administrator panel offers options to set criterion to auto-merge customer’s tickets. This saves agent’s manual efforts in getting the complete visibility of ticket information.

Take Pre-emptive Actions with Automation In Place

Tackling customer issues and resolving their tickets efficiently and effectively needs a productive workforce as well as appropriate tools to empower them. Automating notifications for external and internal stakeholders is fundamental for a successful SLA management. Moreover, assigning or transferring tickets to ensure a timely action in ticket handling needs accuracy and speed. This reduces average ticket handling time and results in a streamlined proactive support.

Ameyo’s Event-based triggers can be set to work on the operational workflows of your business. With event-based ticketing system automation, the help desk administrator has access to Multiple Configurable Workflow options, which facilitates configurations for auto updates, auto-assignment, auto-escalating tickets.

Complete guide on managing your Whatsapp Based Ticketing system

Streamlining Ticketing System Workflows Based on Time-bound Events

Configuring auto-checks for time since the ticket is created or assigned saves manager’s time to focus on monitoring more important tasks and setting resolution plans in an hour of chaos. Ameyo’s administrator panel lets businesses to configure time-based rules and the criterion or conditions that are to be checked on set time intervals.

Are you looking up for a solution that can help you minimize the support ticket turnaround time and take off that extra manual efforts from your customer support team to resolve a ticket? Make your lives easier with Ameyo Fusion CX, a complete solution to set you on the mark to take on all the automation challenges.

Why Should Travel & Hospitality Companies Care About Customer Experience?

What is the first word that comes to your mind when you think about the reasons for the growth of a business? If you said “customer experience’’ then you probably know those companies that consistently offer best-in-class customer experience to their clients. More so, in case of the travel and hospitality industry.
People love to travel – for fun, work or adventure, but they often have poor experiences, especially when it comes to their travel companies or operators. Ensuring excellent customer experience is the most important factors to retain them. And, with the advent of latest technology, powered by artificial intelligence, the sky is the limit (quite literally!)
Here are some strategies for improving customer experience in the Travel Industry:

#Improve Website Experience

Customers today have become self-reliant especially in the digital age. Today, they prefer to search for the best holiday packages and deals online rather than going to an agency. So, it’s important to ensure that your website has a pleasant user experience. Additionally, highlight your tours through exciting images of the activities, places, and cultures your guests can experience. Include relevant information and blogs to provide travelers with all the details that might be useful for their trip. Using social proofs such as putting the customer views and testimonials along with the links to your social media accounts will further improve customer engagement.

#Set up a Travel Contact Center

As a Travel firm, you have to figure out ways to address your customers’ issues in a timely fashion. Building an omnichannel travel contact center allows you to handle inbound queries across multiple channels – social media, email, voice calls or live chat. Time is precious and no one likes to wait for long to get assistance. So, this improves the effectiveness of query handling and reduces the customer wait time. Additionally, you can also provide self-service option to the customers by investing in a contact center software. This allows the business to engage with the customer on the channel of their choice and provide a consistent customer experience.

#Deliver Personalized Customer Experience

Every person likes to feel special. Ensure you deliver a personalized customer experience by maintaining the records for each traveler. These records will include information about the traveler’s preferences and behavior which will allow you to customize your offerings. For Instance, if you already know traveler’s preferred time to travel, their favorite hotels, etc then you can provide a customized package to the customer.

#Loyalty Programs

Like any other business, it is imperative to retain good customers in the travel industry also. To ensure that you can introduce loyalty and reward programs. Most companies offer their frequent travelers reward points that can be redeemed at a later date. Similarly, you can also offer them loyalty cards to enlist them as your gold or platinum customers and provide additional services such as priority booking or lounge services along with a direct hotline number in case of complaints.

#Use a Trusted Payment Gateway

Every customer wants his bank details to be safe. Provide a safe and secure way for your customers to make payments. Integrate with a trustworthy payment gateway that not only protects the customers from any fraud but also makes it convenient for them to make payments via the currency of their choice and even the mode of payment.

#Conclusion

It is very complicated to manage customers in the travel and tourism industry. People have wholeheartedly accepted the technological advancements. But, at the same time, they seek personalization. Organizations need to catch up with new technologies such as artificial intelligence in delivering good customer experience and contact center software. You have to first focus on your customers’ needs only then, you can expect their loyalty. Try to resolve customers query quickly and provide them with 24/7 support especially when they are traveling. Doing all this will help you to increase the customer satisfaction and make them your best brand ambassadors.

Why Do You Need Cloud Based Contact Center?

Have you been looking for a contact center solution that fit your business? Cloud Based Contact Center technology is reigning the world of customer service and if you belong to the domain of customer experience strategies, call center cloud software is the resort for you.

Cloud based contact center has seen tremendous growth in past few years and why not, this technology allows you to access the data from remote locations as well. If you do the math, you will know why industries are moving from on-premise to cloud solutions and are excellent big time.

Would you like to save some money and install a more secure system for your data? Upgrade the operational efficiency of your contact center software while minimizing the infrastructure cost.

So, what is cloud contact center?

Cloud contact center is hosted over cloud on internet server. Your customers are using digital media and you need to stay connected consistently. Ease of deployment and ease of delivering fastest services to the customers will take your business one step ahead of your competitors.

According to a recent study, the cloud-based contact center market is projected to grow from $5,430.3 million in 2016 to $15,670.9 million by 2021, at a CAGR of 23.6%. So, the numbers speak for itself and the need of transforming your business from legacy contact center to a modernized contact center rises.

Why do you need a cloud based contact center?

Lower CAPEX Requirement

Time to save some money and make your business more compelling. Deploying a cloud solution brings down your Capital Expenditure significantly as you no longer have to invest in hardware components.

How about accessing the data from remote locations? Yes, you do not have to set up physical location for your business, no need to manage expensive hardware system because cloud solution allows you to work remotely. All you need is internet access in your system and you are good to go.

Secure your Data

Customers are always concerned about their data theft. Drive customer’s loyalty by saving them from data leakage with Virtual Private Network (VPN) and ensure safe communication with your customers.

Do you work in bank and play with numbers? You need to save your data without having to compromise with scalability.

Flexibility and Scalability

You want a solution instantly? Do not wait up because it is easier than ever to set up cloud contact center and you do not need technicians for setting up and configuring hardware. One of the

cloud contact center benefits is the increased flexibility and provide multiple provisions to work with employees sitting in different locations.

Expansion of business operations are just at the tip of the fingers as hardware sizing are managed by the cloud service provider. Adding or reducing users is as easy as managing your google drive, no cost involved for new hardware set up.

Disaster Recovery

So, you deal with data loss with a system breakdown. Cloud solution provides a data backup stored in the cloud for you to access it at the time of emergency. Route calls to agents easily by leveraging the benefits of cloud operations in your contact center in case of operational failover.

Move towards larger client base and attract more customers with Cloud Based Contact Center. Reach customers through all touch points and deliver an exceptional customer experience while saving money. Cloud based solution provides high levels of business continuity as redundancy is often available as a default offering by the cloud service provider.

Deploy Ameyo’s Cloud Contact Center software with ease of use and availability to scale up your business.

Also read, What, Why and How of Cloud Contact Center to drive better results for your contact center.

How a Virtual Call Center Can Help to Scale Your Business

A big business starts small, but the key lies in thinking big and scaling fast. Scaling a business is easier said than done. Small businesses providing customer support through a call center face multiple challenges while scaling operations. Implementing a virtual call center solution can save equipment and installation costs, along with a lower attrition rate that tends to be high for traditional call centers.

What is a virtual call center?

A virtual call center can be defined as an outbound or inbound call center where the customer service agents are working from remote locations instead of operating from a centralized location or a single office. The best virtual call center platform seamlessly integrates the company’s head office, remote offices, or agents working from their homes. Virtual call center solution provides the businesses with the required networking infrastructure on the cloud to integrate geographically dispersed service agents into a virtual call center catering to customer needs relentlessly.

Virtual call center for small business

Deploying traditional call center solutions is not feasible specifically for small business organizations that plan to expand their operations due to multiple reasons like:

Long Lead Time – Implementing the traditional call center software across multiple geographical locations implies long lead times and huge costs.
Need for Additional Infrastructure – Legacy call center platform needs multiple hardware and software requirements along with specific network infrastructure requirements.
High Maintenance and Dedicated Resources – The maintenance of traditional contact centers is also very high with the continuous requirement of dedicated IT staff.

Virtual call center comes to the rescue of small business by overcoming these challenges by offering the following operational benefits:

Easy and Faster Setup

As a remote call center solution needs no specific infrastructure to set up, hence the entire deployment can be done at a much faster pace. In addition to the cost benefits, it reduces the operational overheads, which can be a big hindrance specifically for small businesses, which have limited resources.

Geographical Mobility

Organizations are exploring workforce resources across geographies to optimize their operations and virtual call center platform is the most suitable option to effectively manage multiple, geographically dispersed agents in real-time.

No Additional Hardware

A virtual contact center doesn’t require investing in expensive hardware or a big dedicated IT maintenance team as compared to traditional call centers. The majority of the remote contact center services are hosted by third-party vendors who also provide support solutions which means no investment required on a separate team.

Scalability and Flexibility

One of the biggest advantages of virtual call centers is the ease with which companies can scale their operations as per current demand. If you are adopting a remote technology, you will have to evaluate whether it is scalable. A traditional contact center may have fixed costs and is not good at handling any changes in the business. But, if you are investing in a virtual contact center solution, you need to know how well it can handle an increase or decrease in call volumes.

Business Continuity

Business continuity is the most crucial factor that distinguishes the virtual call center from a traditional solution. Traditional call centers are prone to hardware failures that leads to downtime. Thus, there is no break in the customer service in the event of a network outage, natural disaster, or some other unforeseen event.

How to choose the best virtual call center software

Many contact center software companies offer remote call center services under a pay-as-you-go scheme. A virtual call center is the most preferred option for small businesses due to the speed and ease of implementation.

Any business must evaluate a virtual call center software on the following criteria before deciding to go on board with a remote solution-

Flexibility To Choose Your Own Device

A virtual call center should allow you to manage calling operations with the device of your choice. Agents should get the flexibility to use laptops or smartphones without compromising on their productivity. Eliminating the device barrier is helpful for small businesses as they will not have to invest in setting up infrastructure while. The mobile agent app provides the flexibility to perform all contact center functions with ease.

Complete Voice Support Functionality

The basics of call center operations remain the same over the virtual call center platform as well. Providing customer support 24/7 requires call center features like IVR and intelligent routing to ensure no calls are missed and timely support is provided to customers. Similarly, if businesses are running an outbound call center, then features like auto dialer, click-to-dial, and predictive dialer are a must.

Device and Network Monitoring

Along with the complete contact center functionalities, the remote contact center solution has the capability to provide detailed device monitoring reports to supervisors which can then be analyzed to monitor the performance of each device used by the agents. Additionally, it also provides the flexibility to identify reasons for low productivity when agents report low internet connectivity, unsupportive devices, poor call quality, etc.

One-Click Integration

Virtual call center services can be a success if companies can integrate their existing systems with flexibility. An ideal virtual call center offers continuous support while providing flexibility in integrating with third-party CRM platforms like Salesforce, Zendesk, Microsoft Dynamics, Zoho, Freshdesk, etc.

Real-time Agent Monitoring

With a dynamic call center technology, real-time monitoring of agent performance is just a click away. Virtual call center solution with elaborate dashboard and reporting features makes it possible to track all the activities of the call center agents irrespective of their location, device, or environment. Detailed analysis also makes agent training and coaching easy as managers can keep a track of agent activities and their engagement with the customers.

Team Collaboration

Agents need assistance from their supervisors or fellow agents while attending customers’ calls. With a flexible feature like internal chat, confer, or transfer, an ideal virtual call center platform should provide on-call assistance and team collaboration. This practice reduces call handling time and improves the first contact resolution effectively.

Robust and Secure

Businesses must remember that they are dealing with highly sensitive data and information of many customers who have shared it with a trust in the brand. Ensuring data security and maintaining compliance is paramount for businesses. While choosing the best virtual call center, you will have to make sure that there is no chance of a data breach. Smart virtual call centers provide a lot of security benefits and adhere to call center compliance.

If you are planning to scale your call center operations or want to set up your own call center and looking to know more about how to set up a remote contact center, do check out Ameyo’s virtual call center solution.