Does SWOT Analysis Help Improve Your Call Center Operations?

A SWOT analysis helps analyze where you stand as a call center. SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

Strengths and weaknesses are internal factors that you can control – staff, processes, technology, training, infrastructure, and customer satisfaction.

Opportunities and threats are external factors that are not directly in your control, but you can act on them – market trends, competitors, regulations, and customer expectations.

Why Doing a SWOT Analysis Is Important for a Call Center?

I am going to cite a few examples here that can be a result of your SWOT analysis.

Example 1

Your SWOT identifies an opportunity that there is going to be an increasing demand for multilingual support.

This can guide your hiring policies and training of your existing resources.

Example 2

You identify that your agents are spending a lot of time moving from one screen to another while addressing customer queries. They are finding it difficult to find the relevant information, which is a weakness.

You understand that this is because of the outdated technology that you are using. So, you decide to migrate to an omnichannel platform and ensure that it is integrated with all of your internal systems. Now, your agents are able to access everything from a single interface or channel.

Example 3

You are a BPO in the collections space, and you find that competition is increasing tremendously, which is a direct threat to your business.

You understand the increasing competition and set out to differentiate your offerings from those of your competitors.

You focus on additional value that you can provide, like increasing right-party contacts, providing direct access to reports and analytics to customers, and ensuring compliance with all regulations. Also, you look at leveraging AI to enhance the customer experience.

Example 4

Your metrics show that your agents’ average handling time (AHT) is way beyond the defined timelines.

This means you need more agents to handle customer queries, which is cost-prohibitive. So, you decide to train and retrain your agents to address this weakness and how they can effectively handle customer queries within the defined AHT.

These are only a few examples for us to appreciate the value of doing SWOT analyses for the call center.

How Do You Go About Doing a SWOT Analysis in a Call Center?

To do this, you need to gather relevant information from different sources, such as customer feedback, employee surveys, performance reports, industry benchmarks, and competitor analysis.

The easiest way to go about doing this is to mark four quadrants for each of the SWOT components, list as many factors as possible, and rank them according to their importance and impact.

Now, let us talk about how you can go about doing this.

Gather Data

You should review agent performance metrics like first call resolution (FCR), average handling time (AHT), customer satisfaction scores (CSAT), net promoter scores (NPS), and employee turnover rates.

Surveys or feedback sessions should also be conducted with agents, customers, and other stakeholders.

All of these would throw up a fair amount of information that you can put down as a part of SWOT.

Brainstorm with Stakeholders

Organize brainstorming sessions with key stakeholders – agents, team leads, supervisors, and managers. The most important stakeholders have to be your agents, who are on the ground listening to your customers as the face of your organization.

Ensure that you fill-up the SWOT template with as much information as possible, which you can segregate based on importance and impact later.

Ensure that you are specific, realistic, and honest while assessing your call center’s SWOT.

Assess Each SWOT Component

This is an example of how things might look.

Strengths: What are we doing well?

Examples include high FCR rates, low AHT, skilled and experienced agents, multilingual support, AI capabilities, cutting-edge CRM tools, omnichannel platforms, and robust training programs.

Weakness: Where can we improve?

Examples include high attrition rates, poor training programs, long wait times, poor integration between systems, and outdated technology.

Opportunities: What external trends or changes can we make use of?

Examples include the growing demand for chatbot integration, the untapped market in remote customer support, and leveraging AI for predictive analytics.

Threats: What external challenges can hinder performance?

Examples include economic downturns, stricter regulatory compliance needs, competitors offering lower-cost services, and rising customer expectations.

Prioritize

Prioritize each SWOT factor based on impact and urgency.

Your focus should be on addressing weaknesses and threats while exploiting the opportunities.

What Do You Do With the SWOT Analysis?

You need to match the factors in your SWOT template and identify strategies that will help you achieve your call center’s goals and objectives.

Look at it this way. You can use your strengths to take advantage of your opportunities and mitigate threats. You can use the opportunities to overcome your weaknesses.

You should prioritize the strategies that have the most potential and upside and assign responsibilities, resources, and deadlines for each action.

In effect, create an action plan.

You should develop specific and measurable strategies to act on SWOT findings.

Let me give you a few examples.

• If a customer feels frustrated about being transferred from one agent to another, introduce an intelligent routing capability that can direct the customer to the right agent based on their needs.
• Reduce attrition by offering career growth paths and better benefits and incentives.
• Promote 24/7 availability, multilingual capabilities, and omnichannel capabilities to attract global clients.
• Deploy self-service tools like FAQs, knowledge bases, community support, and chatbots to reduce call volumes and automatically address transactional queries.
• Invest in infrastructure and training to ensure compliance with evolving regulatory standards.

Consider a call center with high turnover rates (weakness) in a highly competitive market (threat). It is a deadly combination that would take your call center down. With SWOT, you would discover the opportunity to use self-service channels for handling repetitive queries, reducing the load on the agents, and improving retention.

SWOT analysis is not a diagnostic tool. It is a strategic driver that would guide the way forward for your call center to be relevant, competitive, and customer-focused.