For office managers, improving call center operations is an ongoing goal. You want to provide the best customer experiences possible, but it’s a challenge to coordinate teams and create repeatable processes.
From agreements and down payments to customer service to billing, there are many steps where the system can break down.
Investing in call center software and improving training will make life easier for customers, management, and front-line staff.
Call Center Operations: Problem Areas
Contact center operations rely on all departments and employees working together. Human error and policy or procedure blindspots can impact:
- Wait times: When processes are slow, manual, or agents have to log into multiple systems, even a simple task can take a long time.
- Agent performance: The more complex your tech stack is, the harder it becomes for staff to learn (let alone master). This hurts performance and morale.
- Call resolution outcomes: Disorganized systems, confusing software platforms, and poor customer experience will ultimately lead to more complaints.
Here are some of the most common pain points that impact contact center operations.
Billing and Payment Call Center Operations
Your invoicing, billing and payment procedures have the most direct, major impact on revenue and customer satisfaction.
Difficult or confusing payment processes produce complaints, slow down collection, and increase abandonment rates.
For higher payment engagement rates:
- Use email or SMS: Many contact centers use PDCflow to send payment requests by email or text, instead of outbound phone calls or paper bills. Customers click a link and pay from anywhere, instead of typing in URLs or reading payment information to an agent.
- Send in bulk: Sending payment requests in bulk engages thousands of contacts at once. With PDCflow, companies can upload a CSV of up to 5,000 contacts. Streamline call center performance and reach a larger customer base than outbound calling alone.
- Set up auto-reminders: Automation is the secret to better contact center operations. PDCflow’s automated payment reminders quadruple customer payment success rates.
- Offer multi-channel payments: Not every customer pays the same way. PDCflow also offers portals and a virtual terminal, so customers can pay the way they like best.
These interactions are crucial for customer service and revenue numbers but there are data security, regulatory, and compliance concerns too.
- PCI compliance: How to maintain call center PCI compliance is a top concern, whether agents work remotely or at the office. Your payment processing software should offer ways to reduce PCI scope to make collection simple for staff and secure for customers.
- Tokenization and Encryption: Every time a customer makes a payment, they trust your business to protect their sensitive data. For example, PDCflow provides credit card and bank account tokenization and encryption. This ensures that payments are secure and no one can access sensitive details afterward, when information is being stored.
Once you have your secure payment channels, request workflows, and late payment strategies in place, customer calls will become easier across the board.
Late Payment or Delinquent Account Collection
Call center operations need to be monitored closely in past due departments. Create one-time campaigns to clean up open accounts from late payers.
Many PDCflow customers also use bulk requests to send settlement offers. This helps to recover payments from hard-to-reach customers. Email and SMS requests encourage people to pay, without launching a labor-intensive outbound calling campaign.
Contract and Payment Call Center Operations
Many call center teams or collection departments, like those in consumer goods and service industries, manage contracts and onboard new customers.
Here are some of the most common contract and payment struggles contact center operations must address:
- Getting both a signature and payment: Coordinating across departments and in different tools might require manual workarounds and extra staff training.
- Bumpy onboarding processes: When signatures and payments are separated, departments can’t always track the stage of a request. Extra follow ups and confusing workflows leave clients with a bad impression before they get to know you.
- Outdated, low-tech workflows: Sending contracts by mail is a thing of the past and asking customers to print, sign, and scan in a contract is a bad customer experience.
Every extra step gives customers the opportunity to change their minds. Once a prospect has agreed to become a customer, it’s important to secure any signatures, payments, or deposits right away.
PDCflow gives contract management teams fast, efficient sign-and-pay software, so one request can include everything customers need to get started.
Questions or Complaints During Customer Support
Many call center operations revolve around customer concerns, questions, and complaints. Your brand reputation depends on team member responsiveness.
This includes ticket response times, call center wait times, and efficiency when sharing resources and information.
More ways to improve customer service and reduce call volume:
- Understand the customer journey: Review the steps your customers take to get help, make a payment, or sign a document. Improve channels for self-serve payment. This eliminates a large number of customer service calls, freeing up staff for other tasks.
- Create a standard operating procedure: Create standard procedures for how call center agents should handle common situations like complaints. A uniform policy makes it easier to train staff and compare performance.
- Simplify telephone interactions: Make it part of the process to send itemized statements, invoices, or policy documents to an inbox or mobile number during calls. When customers can review information live with an agent, call resolution times drop.
PDCflow’s requests are good for more than just taking a payment or signature. The same tools that let you send a contract to a new customer let agents:
- Send up to five documents in one message
- Send to multiple recipients
- Request photo and file uploads, for those needing documentation from customers
How to Improve Call Center Operations
Cutting corners with staffing and resources will only create more problems down the road.
To improve call center efficiency, office managers should invest in the people and resources to keep the contact center running smoothly. This means:
- Payment and eSignature Software: Using smart, multi-purpose software to simplify and automate tasks across departments
- Personnel Best Practices: Hiring, training, and retaining, driven employees
All-In-One eSignature, Billing, and Payments
Call center operations are often scattered across separate software platforms, spreadsheets, or through company email accounts. But staff can only do so much without the right tools.
For the smoothest call center operations, you’ll need workflow templates, email and SMS, payment processing, and reporting together.
PDCflow’s payment and signature software simplifies call center operations and eliminates long training schedules.
Better Hiring
If you make the right hiring decisions the first time around, training and retention become much easier. Take your time reviewing resumes. Print hard copies if needed to make notes on each.
Ask yourself if the applicant can do the job in question, whether they will likely be a short-term or long-term employee, and consider how they will fit in with other call center team members.
The internal systems you use for customers can also work for onboarding your own staff. Many PDCflow customers use document delivery and esignature requests for onboarding paperwork as well as customer service tasks.
New Hire and Ongoing Training
Whether your organization has dedicated training managers or this is a shared responsibility for several departments, your company needs to understand the basics of how people learn.
Break information into bite-sized sessions to avoid overwhelming trainees. Relate course material to on-the-job scenarios to help staff better understand the content.
Set behavioral expectations and teach staff the importance of empathy during customer interactions. Staff must be able to empathize and validate emotions during escalations.
A robust, flexible training program will elevate employee performance and build new hire confidence, so agents take ownership of their roles.
Empathetic communication strategies create a company culture of caring and positivity that will benefit your organization and foster trust with customers.
PDCflow For Call Center Operations
PDCflow software is an ideal fit for call centers and collection departments looking to improve operations, reduce costs, and speed up customer agreement-to-cash cycles. Features include:
- Email and SMS requests: Send digital requests to reduce outbound calling.
- Bulk sends: Reduce manual work by reaching up to 5,000 customers at once. Create a request, upload your CSV, and send to everyone at one time.
- Automated reminders: Set up automated reminders with each request, and our system will handle follow-ups. No more manual work or missed tasks.
- PCI compliance: Reduce PCI compliance scope by sending secure email and SMS requests. Customers enter their payment details and we tokenize, encrypt, and securely store the data.
- Unlimited workflow templates: Create as many workflow templates as you need so agents access the right one, right away. Lock down access by department for administrative control.
- Reporting and tracking: Sign up for event notifications to track each stage of a request. View comprehensive reports or drill down to a single transaction.
PDCflow Operations Use Cases
- Contract signatures: Send contracts to a customer for them to review and sign via email or text, cutting out mailing costs and reducing the time it takes to receive a completed agreement.
- Contract and payment: Combine signature requests or document delivery workflows with a payment request, speeding up the payment process.
- Document delivery: Send invoices to consumers by text or email while on the phone, to address questions or concerns about a service.
- Auto-reminders for one-time and recurring: Send automatic payment reminders for recurring payment schedules, or create one-time payment reminders for a gentle nudge.
- Integration with CRM: Take advantage of PDCflow’s developer-friendly integration. Open APIs offer drop-in and low-code components, so businesses can access to payment and communication functionality from their system of record.
Frequently Asked Questions: Call Center Operations
What are contact center operations?
Call center operations encompass the technology, processes, and staff required to run a call center. Some common call center operations examples include:
- SOPs: Creating standard operating procedures (SOPs) for how each department should operate.
- Training: Creating materials, training program outlines, and schedules for staff. This also includes
- Software: Vetting software tools to improve department productivity, cut costs, and reduce staff training times.
How does automation reduce contact center operational costs?
Software automation reduces costs by replacing slow or manual work. Employees spend a lot of time on easy, repetitive tasks.
Automation can do this work faster, without human intervention, which saves money and speeds up business. Some common areas of automation include:
- Automated reminders: These replace follow-up calls, so employees don’t need to spend time dialing numbers or leaving messages.
- Event notifications: These ensure staff don’t need to ask other departments about a request’s status. The notice comes to your inbox as a request move from one stage to the next.
- Recurring payment schedules: Recurring schedules are set up once, and then run for the agreed-upon length, without manually processing each payment.
How do you manage call center operations?
Many call centers appoint an Operations Manager or a team comprised of operations, training, and management staff to handle a company’s operational tasks.
Along with planning and technology investments, it’s important to monitor operations with KPIs. Track metrics like response time, average handle time, and customer satisfaction.
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- ABOUT THE AUTHOR -
Hannah Huerta, Marketing Specialist
Hannah Huerta is a Marketing Specialist at PDCflow. She creates content for the accounts receivable and payment industry.
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