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Call Center Peak Hour Traffic

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One thing Call Center employees worry about the most is the “Peak Hour Traffic” or “Peak Season”. Whether it is the new promotional ad campaign or a holiday season, call center employees drown in the sea of phone calls from their customers. 

You may have the most talented customer service agents in your call center but even then it may be difficult to manage peak hour traffic. The top-performing, efficient and customer-friendly agents can suffer under the pressure of peak hour traffic.

01

What is Peak Hour Traffic?

Peak Hour Traffic as it should be easy to understand refers to the excessive amount of calls that a call center receives during a particular time of the day from their customers. 

The call centers struggle to maintain seamless operation in order to keep the same response time. The priority of a call center is to provide the best customer service and it is the same even during peak hours. The call center employees do their best to provide a flawless customer experience. 

However, it is not easy to calmly manage the customer service during peak hour traffic. So, the following are some tips you can study to develop your own plan for maintaining balance during peak hours.

Call Center Peak Hour Traffic1

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02

How to Manage Peak Hour Traffic and Sustain Customer Service?

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Empower and Train Agents:

Training your agents is the foremost thing you should do because it is your agents who will work the most during peak hours. Train your agents to handle any type of calls and manage any type of customers. Prepare agent scripts with instructions that can serve as a guide for the agent. 

Ensure your agents have knowledge of the service and products your company provides. Give them hands-on experience. You can create a product database with manuals, guidelines, instructions, photos, and FAQs for your agents. 

Preparing your agents with knowledge, tools, training can empower them and motivate them to perform better. This will also help the agents provide a smooth service no matter what the situation is. 

Forecast:

Identify the busiest time for service requests based on the historical records or real-time analytics. You can study the peak hour traffic pattern of past years or past campaigns. This way you can schedule calls ahead of time. While the forecast may not be highly accurate for every season, it will help you prepare for better optimizing your call center. 

Predicting which channel your customers are most likely to flood you with queries and when can help you tackle the busy time and maintain a consistent flow of work. 

When it comes to social media, 32% of customers expect a reply within 30 minutes while 42% within an hour. For email, 90% of customers/clients expect a response within 10 minutes. Having knowledge regarding how your customers prefer to contact your service, you can schedule your agents accordingly. 

Automate and Self Service: 

Automating services can support your agents a great deal. Providing AI-powered chats and even a simple auto-email response can help lighten the load of an agent. 

Self Service is another major factor that takes the burden away from agents. You can automate replies to some of the most commonly asked questions. Setting up FAQs on your company website allows your customer to find solutions and reduces their need to call for your help. 

Videos or picture guides can also be used to provide efficient answers to the customers. This can ensure hassle-free support from customer service.

Don’t shy away from Hiring: 

Peak hour or season can be very stressful for your agents, especially if they are small in numbers. Handling too many calls left and right can dim their motivation and harm their performance. Hiring can play a big role during the time of peak season. 

Forecast based on historical data how many agents you would need. Plan ahead and make arrangements for such time. You can hire temporary agents or outsource the customer support to a BPO. Either way, ensure that professional agents are working who understand your goal. 

Focus on the Complex Issue: 

If you make good use of self-service and AI tools, you are giving your agents plenty of time to focus on the issue that customers can’t solve with these services. Your agents are swarmed with issues that the machines cannot solve. 

Help your team to identify the most complex problems and prepare to solve those. Let the agents guide your customer through the operation and focus on solving the issue fast and first. 

Help your agents by giving them advice on alternative solutions in case their method is not working. Let the other departments know if there is something wrong with the service or product. This will prevent the issue from happening again and you will solve the issue for a lifetime.

Call Center Peak Hour Traffic cvr 1

Personalize: 

Customers like a brand more when they feel valued and prioritized. They expect special treatment from the brand whether it is peak season or not. 

Drafting personalized mail for the customers with their names on it and messages like “XYZ we are missing you at ABC”. A little message can make the customer feel valued by the company. 

Provide more Channels for Communication:

Phone lines can get exhausted and increase the wait time, especially during a peak season. Customers will start to get frustrated from waiting and so will the agents from the pressure. Providing several options for communication can ease the communication problem. 

The callers can use their preferred channels to contact your agents. Live chats are one such channel that takes off a lot of pressure from the agents. An agent as well has the benefit to chat with multiple customers at the same time. This will save a lot of the agent’s time and they also don’t have to put the caller on hold. 

Social media message platforms, email, video chat, etc. are all examples of channels you can offer your customers.

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03

FAQs

Generally, Monday is found to be the busiest day for a call center. Especially when Call Centers were shut at weekends, call volume on Monday increases.

Industry-standard for Call Abandon Rate is between 5 to 8%

Ensure great customer service during Peak Hour Traffic with: 

 

  • Empower and train agents
  • Forecast
  • Automate and self-service
  • Don’t shy away from hiring
  • Focus on complex issues
  • Personalize
  • Provide more channels for communication
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