8 Popular Challenges For Contact Centers Of Small Businesses

Small businesses have faced a brutal economy, and the COVID-19 pandemic was not merciful at all. These problems stemmed up from various causes, including funding, lack of on-site work, office lockdowns and more. No matter the size of the business, customer demands are rapidly fluctuating, and there is no one way to please them. It has been hard for small businesses to keep up, especially when their entire workforce is shunned into their homes. 

Many offices shifted to cloud-based solutions to run their contact center operations. However, keeping up with this abrupt shift and the influx of demands has been a hassle. Contact center challenges are indeed at a high especially for these small businesses. Keeping these points in mind, we have pointed out the top 8 contact center challenges that small businesses might be facing. 

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Earlier, few employees would choose to work from home based on personal grievances. This means businesses primarily trained employees to work from the office. Companies were barely prepared for this sudden shift. Many on-site engineers and contact center agents had to adapt to this change. It caused a delay in operations, customer servicing and other vendor-based work. 

Nonetheless, it has been more than a year that we are struggling with coronavirus and companies sincerely need to look for dependable cloud-based infrastructure. Small companies who are less likely to be prepared for such scenarios must adopt a new work-from-home model that addresses their business needs and specifics like data security. It will ensure business continuity in all situations and scalability. 

Cloud contact centers are a big relief as it facilitates work from anywhere but one should be cautious on multiple factors like network speed, outages and security at both the end points. C-Zentrix cloud is powering numerous small and medium business to embark upon the WFH model.

 

Small businesses spend most of their budget on production, customer acquisition and delivery. This creates a budgetary gap for the customer support side of the business. Tight budgets result in understaffing, longer call queues, dissatisfied customers and eventually loss of revenue. Dissatisfied customers due to lengthy queues is a primary to all contact center challenges. The best way to avoid all of this is to do two things:

• Find out the primary product issue that's causing customer concern. Fixing that issue will reduce demand on call for customer support.
• Secondly, you can choose self-service technology like add a chatbot or create a comprehensive Knowledge Base section to help customers. 

Both of these points help you to manage with reduced headcount without compromising on your support. You can add more staff as you scale up your revenue. 

 

Small scale businesses are less likely to be in touch with popular contact center solutions. But we know that a contact center cannot run smoothly without proper technology in place. A flexible CRM solution with Telephony integration will solve most of your contact center problems. We at C-Zentrix have different subscription plans based on business size and requirement. As per Semrush, nearly 1/3 of small businesses prioritize CRM platforms over other types of technology.

With customer context and contact center controls in one platform, your agents will work efficiently, resulting in happier customer experiences. 

 

Customers are available everywhere- social media, over call, in-store, live chat, WhatsApp and email. As a small business, you have to be available and responsive on all of these channels (relevant for your business). However, deploying specific agents on these channels is a costly affair. However, there is always a technological solution to all these budgetary contact center challenges. You can adopt an Omnichannel solution strategy and train your agents about all of these channels. Due to budget restrictions, multiplexing agents across channels are necessary as one cannot compromise with customer support quality. 

You can further integrate this with your CRM or Lead Management System and manage your tickets and customer history easily. At C-Zentrix, we envision and deliver a complete ecosystem where a Omnichannel contact center can run smoothly with all information and insights at the tip of your hand. 

 

There are times where the inbound calls are more than anticipated. This could be because of outage or some disruption of services. The IVR greetings can inform the caller and pacify them. Call deflection to non-voice channels can be another approach. With self service IVR, your customer may be able to complete some of the tasks without loading the agents. So making the best use of IVR can be an easy way to manage the call flow without overwhelming the team

 

Another root-cause of contact center challengers are its hectic workplaces. Even if agents worked remotely, it would still be a high-paced, glued-to-screen work environment from their homes. These agents will deal with stress and fatigue, which might reflect poorly on their performance. This is true for agents of every company, and it is only human to feel so. It is better to incentivize and set a benchmark to make this stressful experience worthwhile and propel excellence. This has been a trend in most contact centers across the world and is an effective practice. 

As a small scale business, you can improvise on what kind of incentives you want to offer if you are squeezing your resources. It can be gift vouchers, paid extra holidays, or anything else.

 

As a small contact center operation, you might not be sure of call volume. On certain days, you will feel understaffed, and it might hurt your revenue stream. You can avoid such setbacks by setting up a blended contact center, which takes care of inbound and outbound calls. Agents can be logged into multiple campaigns and efficiently manage the call flow. 

 

The key to overcoming most contact center challenges is to track and improve. Small businesses fail to reflect on their daily analytics due to the rush of activities, from meeting order requirements to customer acquisition. As a startup or growing business, it is essential to focus on the slightest changes in your performance. As you scale, you can shift to a weekly or monthly performance check routine. 

Most of your contact center solutions should have a dashboard with daily reports. These reports will include different call-centre metrics that need to be monitored for business growth. The main reason is to forecast demand and plan accordingly or prepare for any financial setback. 

The Way Forward

Digital transformation has been the buzz word for enterprises. But what we observe that numerous small business are silently undergoing their own digital transformation to overcome the contact center challenges. This is making them future proof to such worldwide disruptions that the human race as ever been through. We consult with numerous Small business and are partnering with them in their transformation journey.