Customer engagement is the priority factor that every business concentrates on. Customers may check with businesses anytime for queries, and the customer service agents must respond to their questions and resolve them effectively and promptly. Cloud Call Center solutions are designed to keep customers happy and engaged with businesses.

However, no call center is perfect, and call center challenges are a part of business operations. The First Call Resolution (FCR) rate should be between 70% and 79%. If it is below 70%, your call center needs improvement.

Multiple call center challenges prevail, and it is essential to know about them & resolve them instantly. In this blog, let us discuss 8 significant call center challenges for 2024 and how to get rid of them with feasible solutions.

Poor customer satisfaction is one of the biggest call center challenges facing the customer service industry. They should be able to resolve the customer queries. Failing to do so results in disappointed customers. This can also lead frustrated customers to reach other responsive firms.

With an efficient IVR (Interactive Voice Response) model, calls can be effectively answered, and it acts as an optimal solution for businesses. These automated platforms will make sure that customers are appropriately engaged by connecting to the correct department where they require technical assistance. It can also eliminate customers' long waiting queue factor and result in higher satisfaction.

Usually, your customers will get frustrated with long waiting times for picking up the calls. Call centers with longer wait times have lower customer satisfaction. Longer waiting times can be due to the following reasons:

• Increased call volumes during seasonal peaks and technical glitches

• Lack of agents to engage customers

• Inadequate training programs

• No option of smart routing and call routing systems

The first solution is to implement smart queueing systems, which manage incoming calls and reroute the calls to the available agents. This feature does not disturb the workforce either. Call center admins can use it to monitor the waiting duration and the total number of waiting customers in the queue.

Secondly, AI-powered voice bots and virtual assistants can also direct customers towards the knowledge base. They offer solutions for simple issues such as password setting, order tracking, refund status, appointment scheduling, etc.

One of the most common call center challenges is that they always have a problem with hitting moderate target levels and satisfying customers. Sometimes, call agents will fail to remain polite with clients, leading to unsatisfied customers. Similarly, Company representatives may fail to redirect those unhappy customers to the right technical team or technician, which can result in poor customer support.

If your business has a VoIP phone system, you can streamline the entire communication process and have an ideal operating procedure for customer complaints. An audit of call recordings can be gathered, and all customer conversations can be reviewed effectively.

Setting up a reward system is also a good idea to increase agent’s performance levels. It can be performed by giving titles such as ‘Star Performer of the Month’, ‘Best Achiever of This Month’, etc. Team activities, brainstorming sessions, etc, can also be conducted to improve the training sessions for the agents.

Budget can be the most significant call center problem for every business. They often suffer continuous losses due to high staffing costs. This makes top managers of the business view call centers as a heavy cost burden that would lower revenues and profits. Thus, Many organizations don’t wish to set up call centers and seek ineffective means to serve their customers.

If your organization has fewer financial resources and a tight budget, you can move your business to a VoIP or a business phone system, which is cost-effective. They have economical prices, and most service vendors will customize pricing plans that will suit your business needs.

By switching to a VoIP phone system, companies can save up to 90% on international calls and 75% on operational costs alone. VoIP phones are cheaper and the best way to cut off additional costs as they use only an internet connection and eliminate call center challenges.

Technology is the game-changer and savior for call centers. This is one of the challenges of a call center agent as they struggle to remain updated with the present trends. It is also essential for a manager to know about the technologies to effectively handle whether or not the call center's workforce management is on track.

Presently, cloud-based, AI-integrate software systems are the latest trend in the call center areas. Hence, both agents and supervisors should keep abreast of these technologies to minimize IT issues as well as enhance efficiency. Also, VoIP phone systems are gifted solutions that offer omnichannel communication where businesses can handle multiple channels, such as social media, text, email, etc, in a single platform that can also rule out call center challenges.

Most of the time, IT issues are prevailing with call centers. On a busy, hectic day, phone lines may get jammed, or there are possibilities of getting into trouble integrating additional tools into the existing business systems. This leads to employee and customer frustration, a waste of time, and a significant drop in the company’s overall productivity.

Choose a call center platform that is reliable, simple & easy to use and offers seamless customer support. The right customer service software will have the capability to integrate multiple tools with the existing systems to reduce technical problems.

Communication platforms such as Microsoft Teams, Slack, Zoom, and other Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software tools such as Zoho CRM, Freshdesk, and other internal tools can keep the organizational work organized and effective. Find a call center software that can provide you with the above facilities to remain efficient.

The call center operations have turned out to have a high attrition rate. The work environment can be stressful when they are asked to work for long hours and demand higher targets. This can be one of the challenges of working in a call center. Hence, many agents can quit their jobs without notice, and in general, they will not stay in the company for a longer time.

Additionally, when an agent leaves the company, it becomes an additional burden for the rest of the team members to assist with the increased workload. Hiring new talent and training them from scratch takes ample time, making the present work more difficult and complex. This cycle results in lower team morale and increasing expenses when considering the cost of recruiting, hiring, training, and developing new employees.

Implementing an AI-based call center management platform to offload some inbound traffic and handle the pressure off of your call center staff. You can also utilize workforce optimization (WFO) software to support agent performance across channels and empower agents to learn and enhance.

Yet another call center challenges that agents are facing is the shortage of time to handle high-volume calls. Hence, they will not be able to solve client problems completely or will take time to sort out them, resulting in dissatisfied customers who may lose faith in call centers.

While running a call center, supervisors need to plan for enough phone lines and staff members. Determining and forecasting high call volumes, employee shift rotation, and increasing staff strength can be simple measures to enhance operational efficiency in call center processes.

Undoubtedly, switching to a VoIP Phone System can eliminate numerous challenges call centers face. TeleCMIs robust solution can help you effectively overcome customer service calls and other call center problems.

By tracking, recording, transcribing, and analyzing every customer call in the call center, TeleCMI offers a system to handle end-to-end call management hassle-free. It can be a win-win situation for agents and supervisors to handle and quickly track everything.

Get in touch with our experts from TeleCMI and book a free demo to explore various features of our software.