How to Improve Your Call Handling Service

What is call handling, and how can your business excel at it?

At Whistl, we provide outsourced contact centre services, part of which involves handling businesses’ and the public sector’s telephone customer service, known as call handling. We pride ourselves on our approach to call handling. Our people are our greatest asset, and in an industry synonymous with high staff churn, Whistl’s contact centre team boasts an average staff tenure of over 9 years and individual client tenure of up to 15 years. This team works across various industry sectors on multiple campaigns. As such, we have a unique and valuable perspective on how you can deliver genuinely excellent telephone customer support.

Call handling is the process by which organisations and departments manage inbound and/or outbound phone calls. It could support a diverse range of business functions on an ongoing basis, such as customer service, marketing, order processing, or human resources. Alternatively, call handling can be utilised on a one-off or seasonal campaign basis to support spikes in demand or customer query volume.

When handling phone calls for commercial purposes, you need to ensure, at a bare minimum, that your customers are satisfied (you could measure this with NPS and CSAT) and that you meet national call-handling standards set by the government and private bodies such as the Institute of Customer Service.

To truly excel at call handling, you need to focus on these key areas:

• Meeting customer expectations
• Personalising and humanising your customer service
• Ensuring your customer service team is happy and is driving continuous improvement
• Determining whether to retain your call handling in-house or to outsource to a call centre specialist
• Measuring and improving your customer service performance, benchmarking against your competitors

What do consumers expect from your call centre?

At Whistl, we interviewed 1,000 UK consumers to understand how e-tailers can improve the customer experience when using call centre support.

We found that waiting time and average call handling time are important; waiting times longer than 5 minutes were deemed unreasonable, but people would stay on hold for 9.1 minutes, and 69% would hang up after 10 minutes. We also found that consumers don’t mind if you use recorded messages, provided that they come across as personable, relevant and friendly.

Online shoppers' reasons for contacting a call centre vary widely, from product and stock-level queries to delivery tracking support, complaints, and product returns. Optimising your call routing will ensure your customers speak to the relevant expert who can best help with their queries.

While this study focused solely on online retailers’ customers, in 2020, Whistl also conducted research on a wider range of sectors. We found that for companies in the TV, Internet & Telecoms sector, 48% of customers stopped using a brand or service due to a bad call centre experience, the highest proportion compared to other sectors.

Above all else, consumers really want fast issue resolution and a positive attitude from someone who genuinely cares from your call centre.

How can you offer truly personal telephone customer support?

At Whistl, our priority is to fully utilise clients' systems so that they can maintain complete control and visibility. While we don't integrate directly with CRM/CEM (Customer Relationship/Experience Management) platforms such as Freshdesk, we can update our clients' CRMs, including the telephony element. By synchronising your in-house operations with an outsourced contact centre that has access to your CRM, you ensure that your in-house/outsourced team(s) gather intelligence about your prospects and customers and can serve them based on this contextually relevant, live data. Your customers' and team’s time is precious, and with all parties working with a single source of truth, you will be minimising the time taken to perform tasks.

In this Whistl study, we also found that fewer than half of the interviewed consumers would be willing to spend more with a retailer if the call centre is unhelpful. Not resolving their issue is the number one complaint. During instances where a consumer needs to recontact the customer service team, working with a specialist who has access to your CRM will ensure that the customer service agents have the correct information (such as their first name, order or delivery tracking details) to assist that customer at their next point of contact. This personalised approach can also allow the team to progressively profile your customers, ensuring the most relevant information, including their communication preferences, is gathered.

How can you ensure your call centre team is happy and driving continuous improvement?

Equipping your team with the appropriate call-handling skills, telephony system, and CRM to deliver a ‘wow’ experience will minimise frustration for your customers and telephone support staff. But how important is it to have a happy team? It should go without saying, but the answer is: extremely.

A study by McKinsey & Company found that engaged and satisfied call-centre employees are:

• 8.5 times more likely to stay than leave within a year
• 4 times more likely to stay than dissatisfied colleagues
• 16 times more likely to refer friends to their company
• And most pertinently for this article, 3.3 times more likely to feel highly empowered to resolve customer issues.

But how can you ensure your team is happy? The McKinsey study found that informal team huddles provided time to share best practices, clarify and reinforce employee expectations, set fun team goals, celebrate peer performance, and emphasise the critical roles that agents play.

Another method to maximise a call centre's well-being is to give them greater control and fair yardsticks to work towards. This means maintaining clear, consistent, and actionable KPIs so that the team knows where they stand. However, these KPIs must be realistic, timed, and, above all else, aligned with your organisation's goals.

Lockdown’s impact on customer services and the need to work from home

In a lockdown world, call centre teams have had to shift from working in an office environment to working from home, which has brought its own challenges. One example is how Whistl Parcels helps retailers outsource the delivery aspect of their customer service. In May 2020, delivery volumes increased by 250%, and the number of daily delivery tracking support tickets doubled to about 200 per customer support agent. 

Should you keep your call centre in-house or outsource?

For some organisations, it may make sense to retain all, or at least the vast proportion of call centre operations in-house, but consideration for in-house staffing will depend upon:

• Seasonality of demand
• The type of customer support skills you require
• Your company’s growth aspirations
• Your technical infrastructure
• Your campaign objectives
• Your customers’ preferred communications channels

The benefits of outsourcing call centre services include both cost and time efficiencies. By appointing an outsourced contact centre to handle most of your customer communications, you will have access to highly trained and experienced specialists, rather than paying one or multiple full-time employees, who will require a salary, benefits, and proper training from you and your management team. With an outsourced call centre specialist, you may only pay for the time that telephone customer service is needed across all potential customer contact channels, not just call handling.

At Whistl, we have been helping some of our clients enhance their customer experience for over 15 years. We provide two distinct types of contact centre outsourcing, of which call handling can be a significant element; shared resource, dedicated resource or a mix of both can be considered to produce the most cost-effective solution. Businesses receiving 50+ calls per day would typically benefit from our shared resource approach, in which the call handling is managed through Whistl’s in-house system; this can be the most cost-effective option for SMEs and smaller mid-market businesses, For larger mid-market companies, high street names and the public sector with higher contact volume, Whistl's dedicated resource approach can allocate an entire team exclusively to the client, in which Whistl's contact centre team have access to the client's own CRM and telephony/contact platform providing a seamless extension to your business.

As your business grows, you may need to deal with customers outside of usual business hours and, as such, deliver a consistent customer experience across all of your communications channels. This can be a difficult and costly problem to solve when retaining your customer support staff in-house. Thankfully, some call centre companies, such as Whistl, provide out-of-hours call centre solutions to help with these types of challenges.

For some businesses, it makes sense to retain key customer service staff in-house, while working with outsourced specialists to ensure you have access to the relevant call handling skills as and when you require specialisms such as overflow call handling, customer data handling or managing seasonal peak volume.

How Whistl has helped some of our customers outsource call handling:

Popsa

Another aspect to consider is which communication channels your customers prefer. At Whistl, our Contact Centre team can handle inbound customer emails in multiple languages for companies such as Popsa, an established platform that allows customers to automatically create personalised products using machine learning algorithms via its iOS and Android apps.

Swoon

Since Whistl began managing the customer experience for Swoon Edition, they have seen improvements in customer response times and first-contact resolution through dedicated resources, in which agents are trained with detailed product knowledge to support both pre-sales and post-purchase queries. 

So, in conclusion, you can excel at call handling 

When looking to improve your call handling service, you need to listen to your customers' needs first and foremost. By identifying gaps in customer service quality, monitoring feedback, setting KPIs such as average call handling time, and comparing them with national call handling benchmarks, you will get a reality check on just how good your telephone support is. If there is significant room for improvement, consider your company’s or department’s skills gaps and contrast them with available outsourcing and insourcing options to determine the best tactical plan to pursue and deliver a truly ‘wow’ experience.