Call Center Management Featured Article
Improving Contact Center Efficiency without Sacrificing Quality
Efficiency is on the mind of every company nowadays as they look to squeeze more productivity and pennies out of existing equipment, workers and operations. While it’s an admirable goal to some extent, it’s important that companies don’t get carried away and make cuts in ways that will affect products and services or customer relationships.
In the contact center, penny pinching often negatively affects customers. Reduced headcount makes call queues longer, focusing on cutting average handle time worsens the quality of transactions, and limping along with old technology means companies are not positioned to take advantage of opportunities.
That said - there are ways to boost agent productivity in the contact center without pulling down customer support quality.
Unified desktops. On average, call center agents today must keep about eight to nine applications open on their desktops (in some contact centers, agents use as many as 12 applications at the same time). This often leads to errors, duplicated efforts, confusion and poor performance by some agents. By unifying the desktop – i.e., pulling all important elements such as telephony, call recording, CRM, customer databases, workforce management and more, companies can eliminated duplicated effort, make calls shorter and improve the quality of customer support that is offered.
Better collaboration through agent status sharing. According to a recent blog post by Talkdesk, agent statuses are helpful for keeping an entire team informed and working collaboratively, no matter where the agents are located. Agent statuses, which can be either changed by the agent or manager or displayed automatically, may be viewed on dashboard in real-time, helping both agents and managers view exactly how many and which agents are available, on live calls, on breaks, offline or any other status.
“Accessing this data in real-time will allow agents to easily collaborate with their entire team -- no matter where they are located,” according to Talkdesk. “For example, an agent might notice that their top sales engineer is offline, thus transfer a VIP customer to their number two sales engineer, rather than have him leave a voicemail. They might also notice that their supervisor just became available and decide to conference them into a tough call to help them out. Thus, agent statuses are extremely helpful for enhancing the collaboration of teams with agents who work from home, in separate departments in the same office, from remote offices and while traveling.”
Cutting down the scripting. Reading a script takes a long time and makes an agent sound like a robot. Customers don’t usually like speaking to robots. They want to speak to a human being who can help them with their problem. If you’re over-scripting your agents, consider cutting out the unnecessary and unproductive elements (like marketing language) to help agents sound more accessible, more human and more autonomous. This will not only make for happier customers, it will make for happier agents, as well.
Chances are good there are efficiencies that can be found in nearly every contact center. Identifying the ones that make life easier for customers and agents and not simply cheaper for the bottom line is the important taskEdited by Stefania Viscusi