Go From Surviving High Call Volume to Thriving in Your Contact Center
Your agents want to create a positive experience for your customers. However, high call volume in your call center can create a lot of pressure and stress which may negatively impact their workload and could trickle down into the conversation. You don’t want that.
In our webinar, Call Volume Spikes in Your Contact Center: How to Go from Surviving to Thriving, contact center experts from Hyatt and AVOXI discuss strategies that work best to prepare for and navigate high call volume.
In a time crunch? No problem. Read on below for the webinar’s top takeaways.
Taking Care of Your Agents to Reduce Burnout
On any given day, your call center agents are dealing with quickly shifting priorities, emotional customers, and a constant flow of calls to answer.
It’s critical to ensure your people on the front lines are taken care of first and foremost. Brian Stoner from Hyatt and Greg Buckalew from AVOXI talk about their proven strategies to ensure agents are taken care of and reduce burnout.
Provide Flexibility
Improve your agents’ feelings of being overworked and burnt out. Here’s how the experts do it when high call volume is inevitable:
→ Overstaffing allows agents to take voluntary time off (VTO) while also having the capability to handle those high call volume times with extra hands on deck.
“Because we have the voluntary time off that everyone is excited to take, we can manage those costs down even though we’re overstaffed.”
- Brian Stoner, AVP Global Performance & Planning, Hyatt
→ Incentivizing adds motivation during call volume spikes.
Deploy Additional Resources and Support
During call volume spikes, it can be easy for agents to get behind in the queue. Additional resources and support include:
→ Utilizing on-the-clock staff: Call on other available agents who are already on the clock. Place them on the front lines to help manage call volume spikes.
→ Leveraging global remote teams: Call on global agents in other time zones to help enhance coverage during times of high call volume.
Technology Improves Agility
Your customers are calling because they want something done now. This means that agility (the ability to think and understand quickly) is required in contact centers. But how can you determine just how agile your agents are when managing call volume spikes?
Greg Buckalew, SVP of Operations at AVOXI, explains it’s all about analyzing customer behaviors and metrics.
Analyze Customer Behaviors
Cloud communications technologies give you the ability to track and analyze call center metrics to help determine a customer’s propensity to hold. This way, you can prioritize which customers and queues to respond to first based on your business goals.
Automation
This is a major call center benefit that takes on tasks so agents can focus on meaningful customer interactions.
Stoner points out, “the focus should really be on the customer and not the overall stress of what’s happening in the contact center. We want those agents to focus on quality.”
Process automation can help agents do just that with call routing configurations and AI chat functions.
Keep Agent Teams Aligned
Now that many businesses and call centers have moved to remote workplaces, keeping global teams aligned may seem difficult. But, it doesn’t have to be.
A few ways Hyatt and AVOXI keep agent teams aligned is routine event preparation and job training during high call volume spikes.
Prepare Teams for Planned and Unplanned Events
Call center teams may experience both planned and unplanned events that can lead to spikes in call volume. Have a continuity procedure in place for both event types to give customer service agents confidence when interacting with customers.
Train Agents to Have Organic Conversations
Although preparation is key, you simply can’t prepare agents for every single interaction. In these cases, teach them to listen to the customer rather than follow a script for more organic conversations.
Better Manage Call Volume Spikes with Cloud Communications
In many call centers, high call volume can leave even the best agents with a full queue of customers needing support. Although they deal with shifting priorities and unexpected situations constantly, it doesn’t have to be so stressful.
Whether you’re looking to reduce employee burnout, improve agility or keep agent teams aligned, cloud communications technology like the AVOXI Platform offers several solutions to help you manage call volume spikes and thrive in your call center customer experience.
On-Demand Webinar
Call Volume Spikes in Your Contact Center: How to Go from Surviving to Thriving
Learn just how AVOXI and Hyatt are managing high call volume in their call centers every day.
