Making call centres smarter: How firms use online scheduling tools to increase efficiency and customer experience

While call centres were once used by businesses to only handle customer enquiries, modern businesses use them to deliver a range of services, including technical support and arranging customer appointments.

Call centre agents handling customer bookings must have a tool which enables them to get a clear, accurate and instant view of all employees available for customer appointments. It may also be a requirement to filter employees according to their location and skills.

Once an appropriate employee has been found, the functionality to make the booking, or amend an existing appointment, must be simple, fast and able to avoid double-bookings. The system should issue a confirmation via SMS or email while the customer is still on the phone, giving confidence that their booking has been dealt with as a priority.

Advantages:

• Dealing with calls quickly and effectively decreases waiting times and complaints regarding booking errors. 
• Call times are reduced as agents can quickly use the system to find the right resource and best available time slot for customers
• Real-time synchronisation of appointments in shared calendars means booking staff always have the highest degree of scheduling accuracy.
• Employees have 24/7 access to the up-to-date schedule wherever they are and from any device.
• Prevention of double bookings and other scheduling errors.

How to do it with TIMIFY

TIMIFY is an online scheduling software that can be easily adapted to the needs of a call centre, to aid in providing first rate customer support. 

The easy-to-use system brings speed and reliability to managing and organising customer scheduling enquiries, while giving always up-to-date visibility of employees’ schedule availability.

What do we offer?

1. One aspect that sets TIMIFY apart from competitors is for companies working across multiple branches. Our Branch Manager Tool allows real-time access to the scheduling information for employees and resources for every branch. This allows agents working from a centralised location to quickly and efficiently allocate an appropriate employee in an appropriate branch and schedule a customer booking with 100% accuracy. 

2. TIMIFY’s advanced team calendar allows a call centre agent to access multiple calendars at a glance, enabling them to view booked appointments, availability, future working hours, holidays, sick days and more. 

3. Resources or employees can be organised and filtered by department,  branch, geographic locations and more, allowing companies to organise resources as best suits their business model.

4. Our advanced permissions functionality allows businesses to customise who can make what changes in any given shared calendar. For example, call centre agents could be limited to only adding new appointments, while deleting or modifying bookings could be restricted only to supervisors. 

5. Our Incoming Booking function puts an end to double-booking errors. As soon as a call centre agent selects a booking slot in the shared calendar, any other agent reviewing the same slot will instantly be presented with the ‘Incoming Booking’ message. If the original booking is not completed, the slot will become available once more for other agents to review.

6. When an agent books an appointment, the customer and relevant employees immediately receive an email or SMS confirmation with the details. Likewise, should the agent, customer or relevant employee amend the booking, all will receive immediate notification.

How it works:

with the example of a TIMIFY user in the real estate industry

1. A property owner contacts the call centre to book an appointment with an estate agent who can evaluate a property in Munich to be put up for sale as soon as possible.

2. The call centre agent is logged into the Branch Manager tool and looks up the Munich branch, accessing its staff calendar with a simple click.

3. The agent then can select a suitable employee according to their availability and skills. 

4. The agent informs the customer of the next available appointment(s). Once the customer confirms their preferred time slot, the agent books the appointment and an automatic confirmation is sent to the customer and the estate agent at the Munich branch.

5. The new appointment booking is updated in real time, giving instant visibility to any other person in the business of the latest schedule availability. 

6. An appointment reminder is automatically sent to the property owner 24 hours before the visit of the estate agent, helping reduce the time and money wasted on no-shows and missed appointments.

If you are interested in learning more about how TIMIFY can help your call center manage scheduling requests easily and increase customer satisfaction, please book a call with one of our representatives.