Let’s start with the positive—if your company is experiencing steady high call volume, it’s likely that your business is growing. Maintaining a high-volume call center is the solution for serving the needs of additional customers. Still, you must be prepared for the extra volume. If your staff is having difficulty managing a higher volume of calls, emails, or chats in an effective and timely manner, it is a sure sign that your company’s growth has exceeded customer support capabilities. At this juncture, it may be time to consider an outsourcing strategy that moves part or all your contact center function to a professional team trained to manage elevated contact volume.
Determine What High Call Volume Means to Your Business
Preparing for high call volume is more than assuming that it seems like you’re getting more calls than usual these days. Identifying high call volume-based staffing needs requires knowing your incremental call volume : broken down by the hour, the day, week, or month—from which average call volume can be calculated or projected. Understanding your arrival patterns drives the workforce management process, allowing you to forecast sufficient staff to reasonably accommodate the volume of calls from customers at the ‘right’ time. Once calculated, companies can determine if their actual call volumes are low, on target, or high, relative to projected volume in which case the call volume must be effectively managed if a company wishes to thrive.
High call volume is when businesses experience a significantly higher number of inbound calls than projected over a set time increment, exceeding the volume that staff can reasonably accommodate. However, the call increase must persist for an extended period, and the volume should be a minimum of 10% above the predicted volume to be considered “high volume” in general.
How Does High Call Volume Impact a Business?
Businesses unprepared or unable to handle an increase in call volume are likely to lose customers and hurt their reputation. Without an effective strategy to manage increased call volume, service delays are likely to occur along with long wait times, leaving customers dissatisfied. No one likes prolonged holds, especially someone calling to do business with you.
Though it may seem quite obvious, the longer customers are on hold, the quicker customer satisfaction drops. To be sure, Dialpad, a developer of AI-powered cloud communications software and platforms, studied how hold times affect customer service. The research was substantial and conclusive: Dialpad quantified 130,000 customer calls drawn from a pool of 120 companies. Their customer satisfaction metric, referred to as a CSAT score, left no doubt that longer hold times translate to lower CSAT scores businesses receive.
How Your Business Can Manage Increased Call Volume
There are several ways that businesses can adapt and manage high call volume to avoid long wait times for customers or even placing them on hold. Quarterly forecasting, updated monthly, will help businesses make informed decisions on hiring staff or quickly pivot to meet customer needs. Additionally, elevated call volume can be managed through investing in new technology to provide automated callbacks or offering online scheduling of return calls. Chatbots and workflow tool technology also help by stating expected wait times and sharing other contact channel, such as self-service.
Contact the Experienced Professionals at Telecom, Inc.
If high call volume is overwhelming your staff, or you can’t hire and train enough staff to meet customer demand adequately, consider a collaboration with a domestic contact center service to meet your call center needs. Experienced call centers like Telecom, Inc. have decades of experience partnering with businesses of all sizes to help them meet their customer service goals.
To help manage increased call volumes, Telecom has a variety of contact center services to ensure inbound customer care needs are being met to customer satisfaction. Telecom offers any combination of omnichannel support services powered by emerging technologies—voice, email, mobile, web, and social media monitoring—in the capable hands of our trained, experienced representatives. If your company is having difficulty managing high call volume and has outgrown its customer support capabilities, contact us at Telecom to discuss how we can develop a contact center outsourcing strategy that works for you. Our skilled team can effectively manage your increased call volume and optimize your customer’s experiences while you focus your time and energy on growing your business.