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December 15, 2023

How to Effectively Manage High Call Volume

When business increases, call volumes follow. Call centers that lack a reliable strategy can quickly become overwhelmed by the volume surge — increasing wait times and leaving customers dissatisfied. Businesses need to upskill agents in valuable high call volume management skills to improve customer satisfaction and streamline phone call processes. When business is booming, reevaluating your current strategy can give you peace of mind.

Explore the difficulties of managing high call volumes, tips for management and the benefits of outsourcing.

Difficulties of Managing High Call Volume

Call centers often face specific pain points and adverse outcomes due to poor high call volume management. Poor management can result from an influx of calls due to peak seasons, service interruptions, organization issues or improved marketing campaigns without implementing strategies to handle many calls.

Common Reasons for High Call Volume

Here are a few reasons you might have difficulties managing high call volumes.

1. Holidays and Peak Seasons

High call volumes often result from holidays or seasonal changes where activities, shopping and special promotions are available. A large influx of callers during peak season could cause problems in your company's ability to solve every customer problem and thoroughly address customer demands. It's common for wait times to soar if your call center is underprepared with enough employees to handle the surge.

2. Service Maintenance or Outages

Service maintenance, issues or outages are another factor that increases callers. Customers are more likely to call in if an electrical outage, natural disaster or maintenance disrupts your service. Without adequate preparation for an influx in high call volumes, your company will experience long wait times and frustrated clients.

3. Flaws in Organizational Structures

Poor organizational structure often leads to a lack of trained agents, backlogs and long wait times. Pain points such as extended training, new employees or low organization in your company can frustrate customers who rely on call centers to solve problems and provide accurate customer service.

4. Marketing Campaign Improvements

While improving your marketing tactics can successfully drive customers to your business, it may also result in a higher number of calls. Without the strategies in place to deal with an increased number of customer calls, your company may flounder. If you plan to offer discounts, organize promotional events or market to the local community, expect an uptick in traffic and plan accordingly.

Tips for Effectively Managing High Call Volume

Managing your influx of calls ensures your call center isn't overwhelmed by the number of customers who have questions or issues with your product. From using online chatbots to considering call queues and callbacks, there are many opportunities for effective high call volume management.

Here are a few tips for successfully managing high call volumes.

1. Consider Self-Service

Self-service resources on your website may drastically reduce the number of customer calls to your center. Many customers have general questions that your website can assist in answering.

Ensure your online presence effectively answers general customer inquiries about your product, business or service. Including a clear FAQ page is one of the best solutions to this issue.

For example, you can answer questions about the following:

Hours: Provide accurate information on your hours and availability.
Services and products: Include FAQ sections on how to use and fix your product. Detailinformation about services that customers commonly ask for on the phone.
Pricing: What's your product or service pricing, and how does it vary? Include information on pricing, payments, returns and exchanges.
Common topics: Does your company have specific answers to questions about products? Include information about particular services and products which might apply.
Contact information:Your FAQ page should include contact information for specific departments saving your agents from the task of rerouting calls.

Answers to these questions can help customers find their own solutions before having to call your reps directly, effectively reducing the number of calls.

2. Use Online Chatbots

Online chatbots or messaging streamline communication between companies and customers. These AI-based chat tools can answer common customer questions efficiently 24/7 while allowing your live agents to handle more complex inquiries.

You can also have employees communicate directly with customers in real-time to answer quick questions or direct clients to the right place. Instant messaging is often more effective and reduces the need for direct calls, which can take time and energy.

3. Consider Callbacks

No one enjoys being left on hold for minutes or hours at a time. Many companies have begun implementing callbacks to improve customer satisfaction and cut down on high call volumes.

Employees can give customers the option to receive another call at a later time rather than waiting on hold, which allows your team to focus on those in immediate need without the pressure of another customer “waiting in line.” Callbacks also distribute calls evenly while saving customers time.

4. Pay Attention to Scheduling

One of the most significant challenges to high call volume is employee scheduling. Without an adequate number of team members to address customer needs, your company may be unable to keep up.

Ensure that you have sufficient staff on duty, especially during the holidays or promotional seasons. More employees in your center mean you can better deal with customer calls.

5. Communicate on Wait Times

Many customers find it frustrating to be on hold without knowing how long they will wait. Be sure to communicate the possible wait times the customer will experience so they can decide if they want to wait, request a callback or call back later.

Simple greetings can also help make wait times bearable for customers who understand your situation and the reason for long wait times. For example, you can have automated messages that let callers know where they are in line or estimate wait times to let customers know what to expect.

6. Use Online Scheduling

Online scheduling platforms may also be helpful for your call center. For appointment-based companies, many calls come from customers who want to schedule an appointment to use your service.

Allowing for scheduling, confirmations or changes to appointments online can drastically reduce the high volume of calls. Be sure your online scheduling platform can handle many customers requesting and confirming appointments.

7. Consider Interactive Voice Response Systems

An effective interactive voice response (IVR) system can equip you to manage your call volumes by increasing self-service and minimizing talk-offs. When customers call, they should receive an immediate answer, even if it's not from a rep.

An IVR system can mimic an agent and distribute your calls accordingly. In some cases, an IVR can resolve calls without human interaction. Analyze your most common queries and consider whether prompts can resolve them. These prompts help minimize the calls your reps need to answer by ensuring agents focus on calls that require human interaction.

You can also use IVR to confirm the identity of a caller before answering a call. By following prompts, customers input their details, saving your employees time and enabling them to offer a more personalized experience.

8. Increase Capacity

Do you have enough customer service personnel to handle high call volumes? There are cases when customer call centers are understaffed. If you only have one or two people answering calls, high call volumes will be challenging for your business. Take an in-depth look at your customer service team to analyze whether you have enough agents. If you're understaffed, hire more reps.

9. Use Collaborative Tools

Manually transferring calls from one rep to another wastes time. Using a collaborative tool, like a shared inbox, agents can work on a query simultaneously.

Instead of an agent transferring their call, they can tag their colleague in the shared inbox. Their colleague has direct access to the query and can start working on it immediately. All of the information about the customer and their original question is available on the ticket, saving customers the frustration of repeating themselves.

10. Automate Systems

Automation saves time in your workflow. For example, writing a follow-up email to a client may seem quick, but the minutes spent on it add up. Agents can use this time to focus on urgent calls. Instead of writing follow-up emails, you can automate the process. This will save time and ensure emails are grammatically correct and streamlined.

Ensuring Quality Service During High Volume Periods

When answering a high volume of calls, your company will want to ensure quality service. Quality in a high-volume customer service environment can be challenging, but it helps customers feel better about the possible wait times.

Quality assurance allows call centers to monitor and improve customer service quality through reliable processes and strategies. Your company can set standards for handling a high number of calls and observe all calls for compliance with these standards.

Businesses may also address problems with new strategies should current processes be insufficient. Quality service reduces employee mistakes that could cost money or harm the company's reputation.

Here are a few tips for improving your service quality:

Have a strategy: Always have clear strategies in place for dealing with customer calls. Some strategies include providing agents with manuals containing scripted answers. These can be easily searchable, AI-driven digital resources or a printed customer support manual if digital systems are down.
Monitor support channels: Have team members monitor your customer support channels. Be sure they're working correctly to reduce the chance of company errors and misdirections.
Assign quality assurance: One or several team members should be responsible for quality assurance ownership. The team member is responsible for ensuring quality calls at every step in the process and sharing tips with employees.
Share analytics: Look at real-time analytics and share your data with others to improve call quality daily.
Use quality assurance software: Use quality assurance software like call recording and monitoring applications or performance reporting data.
Ensure best practices: Ensure your employees follow all call procedures and best practices to improve customer satisfaction and trust in your business.
Reward your agents: When agents demonstrate an excellent ability to answer customer questions and improve quality service, reward them with higher pay rates, gifts or benefits.

Outsourcing Your High Call Volume

One of the best ways to deal with a high volume of calls is to outsource to another calling company. Outsourced call centers and employees are trained to manage high call volumes effectively.

These are a few benefits of outsourcing to keep in mind.

1. High Call Volume Ready

Outsourced call centers are experienced at managing high call volume situations and can handle the overflow of customer questions, issues and inquiries. Outsourced employees also have the knowledge and professionalism to improve the quality of your calls while reducing customer dissatisfaction or frustration that often comes with long wait times or queues.

Outsourcing is an excellent business option to help mitigate the impact of high call volume periods on your customer service delivery quality.

2. Emergency Support

For customers with emergency questions, consider using an outsourced calling company to handle questions about power outages, natural disasters, bad weather or other emergency problems. During these situations, your services or products may not work or be currently available, which can halt your business and produce questions from worried customers.

Support teams at different locations can better handle inquiries during these situations and can accurately provide information and assistance when needed, despite the outages or weather.

3. Improves Service Quality

Another benefit to outsourcing calling center services is that it vastly improves your service quality, which can be difficult when you don't have enough resources to answer every customer's question. Opting to outsource your calling center functions allows your company to operate more efficiently while increasing quality customer service.

Team members can take calls from anywhere worldwide without being affected by emergencies or outages, improving customer satisfaction. You can also reroute overflowing calls through an outsourced agency to reduce wait times and customer frustration.

4. Access to Right Talent

A team of outsourced call center agents gives your company access to trained talent for a call center job. Through outsourcing, you ensure your customers can talk to someone experienced and professional who will provide reliable answers to customer questions at every point. An outsourced call center may exceed your expectations for quality service.

Outsourcing may also provide stability for your company. You can expand your services with the right outsourcing partner to reduce the load on your in-house agents, who might be overwhelmed by the number of calls they receive daily. With outsourcing, your company can focus on your core business areas effectively while supporting your customers efficiently.

Speak to a BPO Specialist About Call Center Outsourcing

Effectively managing your high call volume can improve customer satisfaction and lead to better outcomes for both the customer and the company. By outsourcing your call center specialists, you can focus on other aspects of your business, including products and services.

Computer Generated Solutions (CGS) helps your business optimize workflow and improve growth through our Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) services. Our company can tailor our solutions to fit your business's unique needs while ensuring excellent customer service and quality calls at every step.

CGS provides outsourcing, corporate training and supply chain services to clients worldwide, while working with customers to receive individualized solutions that fit their company's needs. Our divisions include BlueCherry® Enterprise Suite, Business Process Outsourcing (BPS) and TeamworkAR (TWAR)/Learning. With clients in the fashion, retail, technology, hospitality and financing industries, we're sure to have a solution for your business.

Contact us today to speak to a BPO specialist about outsourcing your call center services or explore our services online.

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