Why Call Accounting is Good for the Contact Center
October 07, 2014
By Susan J. Campbell
TMCnet Contributing Editor
The call center is an environment bent on consistent improvements. This is true, at least, for best in class environments where the company has the competitive lead in the market. The focus is often on efficiency, improving overall metrics and the customer experience. Only those who lead the market have been able to find solutions that support a healthy combination of all three.
If your contact center is not yet in the class of the elite, there are strategies you can put in place to support healthy changes. For instance, did you know call accounting can actually lead to better outcomes? Knowing where money is being spent and why are important in ensuring you’re on track to hit your goals. It’s just as important as measuring customer satisfaction as it helps to keep the focus on what you have the power to change.
Let’s take a look at how call accounting can help improve your contact center operations:
Complete Visibility – it can be frustrating when you have to report overall costs to the executives in the C- suite and you can’t easily drill down on the numbers. Call accounting enables you to identify what calls are driving the most volume, the calls that are taking the longest to resolve and where costs associated with calls needs to be assigned.
Cost Control – are the calls coming into the contact center better suited for another division of the company? Are agents having to provide callers with information they could easily receive when they purchase a product? Investigate your channels and understand where information needs to be dispersed for optimal efficiency.
Self-Service Identification – it’s not uncommon to integrate call accounting software with call recording solutions in the contact center. In doing so, you can identify the number of calls coming in from customers needing basic information. If these calls could be diverted to self-service channels, agents could spend more time on higher-value calls.
These are just a few of the areas where call accounting can help you make a difference in the performance, efficiency and the bottom line when it comes to your contact center. The key is to understand how calls are impacting each of these areas and then identifying changes that can positively affect outcomes. In doing so, you not only have the information you need for further investments in the contact center, you can also show those at the top just how good you are at your job.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi