Growth and human resources are essential parts of organizational survival. Unfortunately, they can sometimes get in the way of each other. Maintaining a human resources department and customer service call center can be massive drains on company bottom lines. They are necessary evils that use up resources but do not generate revenue. However, by designing a scaling call center model, you can reduce the amount of resources these programs use without slowing your company’s growth down. The secret is using artificial intelligence.
What Does the Scaling of a Call Centre Mean?
Scale business models are those that are built to adapt to growth. If you are an organization that currently serves 100 customers per day, a model built for scaling would enable you to also serve 500 customers a day without really changing your internal processes. These models can get pretty complex, but on their face, they are just business plans for expanding easily and efficiently.
Multiple factors might affect your company’s need to expand its call center. For example, perhaps your needs are long-term. This would be the case if you plan on steadily growing at a certain rate over the next five or ten years due to a slow-climbing increase in demand for your products or services.
It also may be the case that demand for your product rises exponentially during certain months of the year if your business is seasonal. For example, if you sell winter sporting gear, you will undoubtedly get more calls from customers in October through March than you will in the rest of the year.
Occurrences with large impact may also affect the needs of your customers to get in touch with you. For example, nobody saw the COVID-19 pandemic coming. Nearly overnight, airlines were faced with unprecedented problems and saw massive spikes in their call centers that they were not prepared to handle.
Even if you feel you are happy at the size that your company is currently at, it is always a good idea to develop a scaling business model for your call center just in case. You never know when it will come in handy!
Why Is it Important?
Call centers are notoriously difficult to run. There are a wide variety of issues that come with the territory. If you manage a call center, you have likely run into the following problems before:
Rapid employee turnover;
Employees that do not want to follow directions;
Agents communicating with customers poorly;
Too much employee downtime in between calls;
High costs of maintaining physical spaces for people to come to work to answer phones;
Having a hard time finding people willing to do the sometimes boring work;
And more.
Being a phone or chat agent at a call center is not exactly glamorous work. Most of the time, it does not pay well. Further, it requires employees to have to work at crazy hours. When people are working at a call center, usually they want to find a new, better job as fast as possible. For all the above-mentioned reasons, it can be challenging to manage your call center at its current size, let alone grow it.
By utilizing artificial intelligence to help you with your call centre modeling, you can improve your business while simultaneously preventing these problems. You will not run into them with digital agents that are programmed to handle a ranging mass of calls and messages with grace at any time of the day or night.
Scaling digitally is going to be the key to business survival moving forward. If you look at all the most successful companies globally, nearly all of them are now using artificial intelligence in some capacity. To compete with them, you are going to have to too. The good news is that this technology-forcing climate is going to be good for your business. As you incorporate new technology, your efficiency will increase and so will your bottom line.
Additionally, as your competitors adopt technology, your customers are going to get used to it. They will begin to expect short wait times, digital agents that can answer their inquiries 24/7, and promised professionalism. By not adhering to the new developing standards for customer-facing interactions, you run the risk of harming your brand image in the eyes of your target market.
What are the Advantages of Scaling a Call Center?
While scaling up your call center with digital agents will cost you a moderate up-front investment, it will end up paying for itself ten times over. Therefore, the number one advantage of managing a tech-equipped scaling call center is that it will save you money down the line.
Another advantage of making call centre improvements is that you will be able to lessen the headache of dealing with human employees. Computer-programmed agents cannot get tired as real people do. They will not get snappy with customers when their patience is being tested, and they do not require hourly wages to stay at work. Human behavior is unpredictable. Unfortunately, this uncertainty can lead to human employees making mistakes that hurt your brand image.
By utilizing artificial intelligence in call center modeling, you will be able to have more control over your brand image. Say goodbye to the days when you have to put all of your trust in low-level employees that you do not know personally, and that are not invested in you or your company’s reputation.
Call centre productivity will also stop you from throwing money down the drain the way that you are currently. Sometimes, your call center might be super busy, and you will need all hands on deck. Other times though, all that will be on the lines are crickets. You might not be able to predict when your lines will get flooded, forcing you to have more employees working than necessary. This will result in downtime, leaving them sleeping on the job or scrolling on their phones. Having a scaled call center will eliminate said downtime. You will be able to scale up and down your labor in real-time depending on the current needs of your inquiring customers.
And, this is all just the tip of the iceberg! There are so many other advantages to scaling your call center that you will discover once you decide to do so. They will all be pleasant surprises.
How Can Chatbots Increase Call Center Productivity?
Adding chatbots to your call center adds a laundry list of benefits to your existing business model. First and foremost, they will decrease response times within your organization. Customers are very used to instant service these days. They can get anything they want from anywhere in the world nearly overnight. So, they no longer want to wait for two hours to speak with a customer service representative when they have a question.
Programming chatbots into your customer service model will give customers an option for immediate service whenever they need it, at the speed they need it, in a way that allows them to multitask. Fast response times will prevent them from getting frustrated with your company and ranting about it on social media.
Additionally, chatbots can be programmed into a multitude of different platforms. For example, you can set your chatbots up to respond to people directly in their text messages, on social media platforms such as Instagram and Twitter, or in their desktop browsers on your website. Customers will appreciate having options for the method that they can contact you using.
Chatbots are also a way to screen out less-complicated customer questions that do not require a human’s brain to answer. For example, customers may call your organization to ask for your address or hours. These answers are always the same and can be answered very easily with a pre-programmed computer script. Getting chatbots to answer these simple questions is a win-win situation for everyone involved. Customers will get their answers faster, and your call center will be less flooded with monotonous calls; thus, giving your human resources more time to dedicate to the more pressing issues coming in.
Scaling a call center can be a daunting task for newer businesses that have not yet begun planning for growth. But, if you are serious about running a successful business, it will be important for you to begin prepping for this success. Contact Dasha AI to see how they can help you use chatbots and other amazing programs to scale up your call center today.