Three Ways to Reduce Call Volume in Your Call Center

Call center cost savings are top-of-mind for most of today’s companies. To reduce call center volume, many businesses use customer-centric self-serve options. These include frequently asked questions (FAQs), a robust library of knowledge base articles, how-to guides, and site-wide search capabilities.

In more recent years, as customer expectations have increased, companies have started to get more creative in figuring out how to reduce calls in a call center. Chatbots, AI-inspired technology, and passwordless authentication technology are examples of tools that help reduce volume in call centers, boost customer service and agent productivity, and ultimately achieve call center cost reduction.

Read on for our call center efficiency tips.

One way to help reduce complaints to your call center is to make your customers’ journey straightforward, with clear communication every step of the way. Your website should offer easy-to-understand site navigation, clearly articulated CTAs, and effortless checkout steps. Make sure self-help options, such as chatbots or how-to guides, are easy to find and simple to navigate.

Provide Frequently Asked Questions on Your Website

If your frequently asked questions are confusing or missing essential common customer questions, then users may give up and call your call center agents. Be sure to create FAQs that are easy to read, contain essential how-to topics, and are updated with the latest information so customers can easily find the answers they need. 

Pinpoint the Reason for Customer Calls

If you can pinpoint the reason behind your customer calls, you can be proactive and solve those issues upfront, before your customer feels the need to call your contact center. This may mean better website copy, more descriptive help text or instructions, and the inclusion of common user questions in your chatbot. 

Make Sure All Channels of Communication Say the Same Things

If customers go to your FAQs, chatbot, or contact center and receive the same answers at every touchpoint, they’ll realize that the self-help options are just as good as calling your contact center, which will encourage them to seek answers through your self-serve channels next time.

Promote Various Channels of Communication

Your customers won’t use self-serve options if they don’t know they exist. Be sure to promote the accessibility of your self-help tools on all channels, such as on your homepage, online chat, FAQs section, and interactive voice response (IVR) messages.

Push Communications Out Via Your IVR

If you’re experiencing technical issues or have changed a process that might spark customer calls, push out IVR messages that direct them to your digital channels. When they see how easy it is to use your digital tools to get answers, they may choose your digital technology next time they have a question.

Digital tools can help streamline your contact center processes, enhance your customer experience, and reduce high call volume. AI-powered chatbots can handle multiple inquiries at once, and machine learning can help predict call volumes and schedule staffing more efficiently, thereby reducing staffing costs. When multiple digital tools are used to handle common customer issues, you’ll require less contact center staff and representatives can focus their time on more substantive issues. Below are some other ways to drive digital adoption.

Offer Personalized AI-Powered Online Assistance

AI-driven assistants, such as chatbots, can understand customer preferences and behavior patterns through machine learning algorithms. By analyzing past interactions and purchase history, AI can deliver personalized recommendations and answers, proactively addressing customer concerns before they arise. This approach can prevent potential calls to the contact center and increase customer loyalty.

Automate Order Tracking and Updates

Keeping your customers informed can cut down on call volume. Send automatic, real-time updates on your customers’ order status, order tracking, and delivery information via email or SMS. This digital follow-up enhances customers’ trust in your brand and reduces the number of status-related inquiries received by your contact center.

Implement Routing with AI

AI-driven systems can intelligently assess and categorize incoming calls and direct them to the most appropriate support agent or team through skill-based routing. By automatically routing inquiries based on complexity and urgency, you can optimize agent call time, minimize call transfers, and expedite a solution for the customer, which leads to an overall reduction in call volume.

Digitally Enable Your IVR 

When a customer calls your contact center, be sure to integrate your digital tools into the experience when possible. Encourage your call center staff to send customers an SMS message that directs them to a website form or help page. Giving customers digital options during the call helps educate them on using your digital options, which may reduce handle times and the likelihood of repeat calls. 

In today’s digital world, your customers' primary interaction with your brand is through your website, mobile site, or app. With more digital interactions than ever before, you need to make sure that customers get quick access to your site so they can purchase your products and services without incident.

Password issues are among the most common reasons customers contact call centers. Knowing how to reduce password reset calls with passwordless authentication is the ultimate goal if you want to deliver frictionless and secure experiences. Below are some reasons why going passwordless is a good idea for today’s call centers.

Mitigate Forgotten Passwords

Traditional password-based systems often lead to a significant number of calls from users who have forgotten their passwords and call your contact center for password resets. This is time-consuming for the user, as well as the contact center staff. Each password reset request has an associated cost, from the staff time to handle the request to the potential need for sending reset codes via SMS or email. By implementing a passwordless solution, you mitigate call center volume and boost agent performance.

Lower Authentication-Related Queries

Traditional authentication systems can be confusing for users who are not tech-savvy. If the password creation process is cumbersome, they may call your contact center for help. User-friendly password technology makes the registration and sign-in process easier, so potential customers can easily create an account unassisted.

Minimize Account Lockouts

In addition to forgotten passwords, users frequently get locked out of their accounts after too many failed login attempts. Frustrated customers may call your contact center to reset their passwords. Passwordless technology eliminates these kinds of issues, ultimately reducing costs.

Lessen the Need for User Education

Call centers often spend a lot of time educating users about creating strong passwords and the importance of changing them regularly. With passwordless technology, this type of education and the associated calls become unnecessary.

Reduce User Downtime

Password-related issues can keep customers waiting on hold while they stop everything to make a phone call to your contact center. With a passwordless solution, this risk is diminished, ensuring the call center operates more smoothly and efficiently.

Free Up Call Center Staff

With fewer password-related calls, call center staff can focus on more complex, value-added tasks, such as answering customer questions about price changes, marketing promotions, billing issues, or other unique questions. This leads to improved productivity and cost efficiency.

Enhance Security

Passwordless solutions often employ stronger authentication methods, such as biometrics or tokens. By eliminating the need for passwords, weak passwords are no longer an issue. With passwordless, you can decrease the likelihood of security risks and reduce potential financial losses caused by unauthorized access.

Eliminate Password-related Cyberattacks

Passwords can be easily hacked, which opens the door to breaches and other cyberattacks. When this happens, customer confidence is eroded and you may experience a surge of complaints to the contact center. By eliminating passwords, you can mitigate the risk of these attacks, thereby reducing contact center costs associated with investigating and recovering from them.

Decrease Fraud-related Costs

Passwordless authentication systems can offer greater security, which may lead to fewer incidents of fraud. This, in turn, can lead to a decrease in the number of fraud-related calls and investigations, which decreases the burden on your call center.

Simplify Onboarding and Offboarding

Passwordless technologies can simplify the process of onboarding your new users, which can reduce the number of support calls related to initial setup. This reduces administrative overhead and associated costs involved in managing user accounts.

Aid with Regulatory Compliance

In some industries, password management may have regulatory implications and non-compliance can result in fines and penalties. If you have compliance requirements, passwordless solutions may simplify compliance and help you avoid potential fines, penalties, or legal expenses associated with non-compliance, while also reducing call volume.

Reduce Third-party Support

In some cases, passwords for third-party applications (perhaps a billing system like PayPal or Affirm) can cause issues that result in calls to the contact center. Passwordless technology, when implemented across platforms, can help you avoid these problems.

Improve Scalability and Efficiency

Passwordless technology is easily integrated into your existing systems and can be scaled as needed, even during peak seasons. On the backend, it helps to streamline your internal processes, reduces maintenance, and lowers call center costs.

How Ping Passwordless Solutions Can Help

The frustration of creating and keeping track of multiple different passwords comes at a cost. Fifty-six percent of consumers have abandoned an online service when logging in was too frustrating. Passwords are arguably the weakest link in security, are the leading cause of breaches, and are difficult for the user and the contact center to manage.

Passwords are just bad — bad for security and bad for user experiences. For customers, passwordless improves engagement, lowers abandonment rates, and ultimately drives higher revenues and improves customer satisfaction.

Our passwordless solution can help you deliver frictionless and secure experiences for your customers and may have a transformational effect on the efficiency of your contact center.