Your ultimate guide to running a successful contact centre

The contact centre is evolving and, with the proliferation of new technologies, it's a challenge to maintain the human touch.

All humans, including your customers, have behavioural biases and irrational decision making. By understanding these you can harness the power of behavioural science to improve call scripts, handle complaints better, and upgrade your training programme. Taken together, these changes will improve NPS, reduce AHT and boost team morale.

Ready to transform your contact centre using behavioural science? Follow this guide for tips to make your contact centre strategy a success.

Table of Contents

1. How to increase NPS

2. How to make calls efficient (and reduce AHT)

3. How to improve scripts

4. How to handle complaints

5. How to improve team morale

6. How to train your team

How to increase NPS

After calling one of your contact centres, how likely are your customers to recommend you to their friends?

Net Promoter Score is a measure of how well your customer experience is performing, and often used as an indicator of the quality of your contact centres.

Embedding behavioural science into your call scripts and training places the customer at the heart of your service, which in turn boosts your NPS scores.

How to makes calls efficient (and reduce AHT)

Your callers might not care about average handling time (AHT), but they do want their call to be efficient.

Call durations have a direct impact on your contact centre costs, and so you want to keep AHT low. What if it was possible to decrease AHT without compromising on the quality of customer service? Even better, what if you could improve AHT whilst improving the customer experience?

By embedding principles from behavioural science in your scripts, you can reduce AHT in contact centres whilst improving customer satisfaction.

How to improve scripts

A script is a helpful way to teach new service representatives, but a rigid guide can make conversations feel robotic. 

Turn your contact centre call script into a flexible call guide using behavioural science, to help service representatives have conversations which feel natural and human.

By improving your call guide using behavioural science, you'll improve NPS, decrease AHT, and improve employee engagement.

How to handle complaints

When customers call up your contact centre to make a complaint it can be difficult to build empathy over the phone. 

Behavioural science offers many principles to help you rebuild positive relationships with your customers. By boosting their ego, emphasising the speed of your resolution, and offering reassurance, you can leverage behavioural science to resolve their complaint.

Try these 3 simple behavioural tactics today to improve your complaints handling.

How to improve team morale 

It's easy to decipher someone's mood on the phone. And if your customer service representatives are in a positive mood, then this will cascade positive effects on their conversations with customers.

But how do you boost team morale in a contact centre?

Try using these ideas from behavioural science to empower your service representatives, help them enjoy their work, and boost their morale.

How to train your team

Your training programme for customer service representatives might cover what to say and how to say it. But does it explain the why?

When service representatives understand why they're saying certain phrases, they're empowered to go off-script and have natural and effective conversations.

But how do you teach this? By including behavioural science in your contact centre training programme.