Your call center is an important part of a customer’s experience with your dealership, and it may play an even more central role in the future. It is increasingly common for research before purchasing a new car to be done online, and once your customer contacts your call center, it will be because they have extensive and complex questions or they are frustrated. You’ll need enhanced call center metrics and other tools ready to support the call center of the future.
Take a look at some of the ways that you can expect your call center to take a more central role in your customer’s experience:
Comprehensive communication: Today’s call center specialists often have to follow a rabbit trail of communication to piece together the phone calls, emails and online chats that explain the path of interactions with the customer. In the future, call centers will have all communications displayed in one place and have full access to the customer’s history with the dealership.
Increased knowledge: Your website provides a rich set of resources with extensive vehicle information available to customers, so by the time they contact your call center, they are asking the more complex questions. Expect that your call center employees will need to deepen their knowledge of car features and various promotions.
Employee engagement: The more your call center employees learn and can meet the needs of your customers, the more you’ll need to make sure you are meeting the needs of your team and keeping them engaged. Finding ways to boost the culture of your dealership and cultivate opportunities for fun and rest between calls will be a key focus for the future.
Call center metrics: Your dealership will look for smarter ways to measure customer satisfaction. You’ll include call center metrics like determining whether the customer’s issue was solved with a single phone call and conduct ongoing customer satisfaction surveys.
Smart monitoring: The dealership of the future will have communication monitoring tools with the ability to measure items like emotion, word choice and other indicators of frustration, so managers will receive a real-time alert when they need to provide assistance in a situation. This time-saving technology will release managers from scoring recorded calls for training purposes.
Taking a cue from Uber: Instead of trying to predict call center volume for scheduling call center agents, your dealership may employ call center agents in a more non-traditional format. In this model, they can handle calls remotely and lighten the load at the dealership when they receive an alert that there’s an opportunity to work.
The call center of the future may become a critical and more central component of your customer service strategy. You may be beginning to see this trend emerging now, with customers often making a call only after they’ve exhausted your online resources or they’ve encountered a frustrating problem. In the future, it is key that your call center can meet their needs in a way that keeps them loyal to your dealership.
