Becoming an excellent call center agent doesn’t happen overnight. While there are a handful of talents and skills that some people bring with them to the job, most of these skills are taught during training and on the job. The more experienced and the better listener and learner a call center agent is, the better they will be at their job over time.

Receiving feedback is one of the best ways to improve as a contact center agent. However, there is a right and wrong way to offer feedback as a member of management in these settings - and the differences between the two can mean the difference in the success and failure of your agents in improving their approach and your business.

Here are a few pointers on the ethical and effective use of criticism and feedback in helping every member of your staff learn how to become a good call center agent: 

How Active Listening on the Phone is One of the Best Practices for Cross-Selling and Upselling

Any call center agent who has been in the business for more than a few days knows that cross-selling and upselling are important parts of increasing sales and improving business when your center is focused on these kinds of metrics. These procedures have been in place since the earliest days of sales, with representatives trained to offer additional goods and services for any customer purchase made.

However, today’s customers are often too savvy to be talked into an additional purchase for the simple sake of spending more. They need a reason to buy - and it is your agent’s responsibility to provide them with one. Here, we’ll discuss how active listening on the phone can create the perfect setup for tailoring sales pitches to your consumers and creating genuine delight in your customers every time.

What happens in your contact center when calls are coming in faster than you have the staff to handle? Ideally, this doesn’t ever happen in your call center. But if your facility is like most, you’ve been caught unprepared for peak times and seasons at least a few times before.

To better manage your peak times and keep your customers satisfied and well-served, it’s important to understand when and why these events happen and how to address them. It’s also important to have the tools to do so. Here, we’ll look at both factors in this equation - and how to set your facility up for success.

Providing excellent customer service and creating a positive customer experience is a critical factor in running a successful contact center of any kind. However, every customer demographic requires a different type of care and attention to achieve this end. This can make serving all of your consumers and creating a consistently good experience for all of your customers difficult.

When many people imagine the modern contact center, they imagine numerous computers and other technology alight with information. This is certainly a reality of the industry – and it’s also a perfect metaphor for the many leads that must be handled by the staff of these centers. The information that flashes across these screens can seem unmanageable if that staff doesn’t know how to manage it – and your facility’s call center leads can quickly become unmanageable and useless to you without proper management, too.

Here are a few examples of how to properly manage your call center leads to get the most out of them so that you can take your business to the next level for your center in the coming months:

Businesses spend a lot of time and money honoring and reaching out to their so-called “loyal customers” every year. There is a great emphasis placed on this loyalty – but why? What is the importance of customer loyalty, and what does this term really mean for your business?

Here, we examine all of that – and why you should be making an effort to retain customers and keep them happy!

Keeping your call center employees on task is perhaps one of the most important factors in creating a productive contact center environment. However, contact center training is also critically important to improving the performance of those employees, but how can you balance keeping your staff focused while providing ample opportunity for training in their schedule?

Here, we will examine a few ways to add more opportunities for contact center training into your agent’s everyday routines – all without sacrificing the productivity or efficiency your call center’s performance depends on.

Finding cold calling techniques that work for you and your team may seem like finding a needle buried in a haystack. When you consider the vast number of ideas, techniques, and strategies that do not work, it is easy to get discouraged in your search to find the ones that do. Use the tips and tricks outlined in this guide to enhance the strategy, structure, and success of your cold calling protocol:

Most agents don’t start out as superstars, though they can turn into them over time. With training and guidance, though, that can happen much sooner. To effectively coach your agents, here are a few tips and practices to try out.

Not sure whether you’re offering expert customer service? The cost of poor customer service is staggering. According to Forbes, bad customer service cost businesses about $75 billion in 2017, the latest figures show. And that number is up $13 billion compared to the previous year.

All that underscores why it’s more important than ever to provide the best possible customer service. If you don’t change the way you interact with customers, then you’re hurting your business. Here are seven pitfalls to avoid, and what you can do to resolve those issues.