How to Enhance Service Level of a Financial Services Call Center?

Consumers have several service options, when it comes to products and services, and a financial services call center uses this to the advantage of a service provider. Simply put, customer experience drives the increase in business in various ways. Through a financial services call center, you will be able to gain detailed information about the consumers and know them better. As a result, you can tailor your services to their needs and offer sound financial advice with additional information.

When it pertains to banking and finance, customers want convenience, efficiency, and expertise from the companies they do business with. A financial and insurance call center services will help you serve your consumers in ways that inspire brand loyalty.

This can be true for businesses dealing with any kind of financial services, be it a bank, credit union, mortgage company, investment firm, brokerage, or insurance company. So, let’s move on ahead and know more about the various ways that will help you enhance the service level of a financial call center.

Optimize Your Occupancy Rate

Occupancy rate is the percentage of time the agents perform work-related duties vs. the total time they are logged in. This includes talking with customers, performing after-call work like updating databases, sending emails, etc.

Across most cases, occupancy rates of a financial services call center are inversely related to service level. As a result, agents are less accessible to handle calls while occupancy rates are high, callers wait longer, and service quality suffers. Conversely, low occupancy rates suggest that agents are more readily available to accept calls, promptly answer calls, and enhance service levels.

Excessively high occupancy rates (over 90%) indicate a heavy burden for agents. Common outcomes are higher agent stress, lower agent effectiveness, decreased agent satisfaction, and increased agent turnover.

On the other hand, occupancy rates insurance call center services that are too low are generally a sign of inefficient workforce management. They can increase costs (since more agents are needed), increase worker boredom, and reduce agent satisfaction. As a result, management should seek to strike a balance between optimizing occupancy rates and maintaining a high level of service.

Improve Your Call Forecasting

Predicting the volume of calls and their arrival patterns throughout the day can be difficult. This includes searching past data, such as volume of calls, handling times, and arrival patterns. There are the following factors to be considered as well as:

• upcoming promotional items and marketing campaigns
• Recurrent events, like dates customers, are charged, billing due dates, etc
• Launches of new products, problems, bugs, and so on
• Variations in the market and industry trends, and also events and activities
• Weather patterns, natural disasters, power outages, significant local and global events, and so on.
• Holidays, weekdays, and hours of the day

Your workforce management, scheduling, and service level will improve as the call forecast of your financial and banking BPO become more comprehensive.

Lower Your Agent Attrition Rate

Agent attrition means the number of employees that quit, are fired or are promoted during a given time. Reduced agent attrition means your team is more capable of handling calls, accessing your business tools, and staying current on the ins and outs of your organization and product. This will improve their overall efficiency, efficacy, customer satisfaction, and even call availability.

Improve Your First Call Resolution Rate

FCR improvement can lead to a significant increase in the quality of service. You should streamline the management in a way that callers are routed to the most skilled agent to meet their needs and he/she resolves the issue without transferring.

Through this, not only is the customer more satisfied, but the agents within the team will be more available to field calls. Both elements, increased customer satisfaction, and more available agents will improve the quality of services.

Optimize Your Workflow Management

Forecasting call volumes, arranging the optimal number of agents to work on any particular day or period during the day, generating schedules for each agent, and making workforce adjustments as needed are all part of workforce management. This is a challenging task that requires consideration of various factors, like,

• Call volume patterns from the past
• Quality of service to be provided
• The number of agents at your disposal
• Upcoming marketing campaigns, product/service promotions, and new launches
• Time spent on calls and after-call activities by agents
• In Time agents spend on calls and after call works
• Time spent assisting various channels, including chat, email, phone, social media
• Breaks, training, and meetings are all scheduled

Non-optimized workforce management can significantly impact service profitability. Understaffing means fewer agents are available to take calls, long wait times, and a decrease in quality of service. Overstaffing leads to more available agents, shorter wait times, and a higher level of service. However, it is more expensive and can harm the budget. As a result, increasing service levels enhance staff management.

Work on Your Schedule Adherence

Workforce management is essential for ensuring that you allocate the correct number of agents to field calls. The quality of service will not improve unless agents stick to their schedules. For example, agents may take long and irregular breaks or spend time on non-work-related tasks, like monitoring social media sites instead of answering calls. In such cases, fewer agents are ready to take calls than planned, and service levels will deteriorate.

Managers must regularly evaluate schedule adherence and make staffing adjustments as needed. Management should also expect agents to not stick to their schedule 100 percent of the time and incorporate this into their staffing decisions. Both occupancy and levels of service will gain from these changes.

Finishing Up

Coming to the bottom line of streamlining the service level of your financial services call center, they aren’t very different from any other sector. However, there are some general guidelines that you need to keep in mind, which primarily concern taking the proper measures to improve the efficiency of a financial services call center.

Currently, the financial and banking BPO is undergoing an excellent improvement spree. This is due to the implementation of technology and management of the agent workforce with optimum efficiency