Call Center Management Featured Article
Trying to Save Money in the Enterprise: Do It Anywhere But the Contact Center
Think fast: who are the most stressed people in the average medium-to-large company? Is it the executive layer, continually dancing to please stockholders? Is it the product managers, under pressure to bring new and innovative products and services to the company pipeline? Is it the sales team, working under onerous minimum sales goals? Maybe it’s the IT department, which is expected to work miracles on limited budgets every day? While the stress these workers experience shouldn’t be downplayed, chances are good that the most stressed out people in the organization are in the contact center, providing customer support.
There’s a reason why turnover is high in contact centers: the jobs are poorly paid, the workers operate under intense pressure to stick to metrics including average handle time, and they spend part of their day, every day, dealing with hostile customers. Earlier this year, a study conducted by the International Customer Management Institute (ICMI) found that most contact center agents experience high levels of stress on a daily of basis, and this stress is causing them to become more apathetic toward their jobs. When customer support workers become apathetic, it’s customers who suffer, and customers are more than willing to pass that suffering on to companies by vowing never to purchase again, according to a recent article by Jeanne Landu writing for Business2Community.
“When morale is low, it is to be expected that it will eventually seep into an agent’s interaction with a customer,” she wrote. “Businesses cannot expect agents to provide superior customer service when they are experiencing inferior job satisfaction. So what can be done? When asked what is needed to help improve performance, two answers were commonly given: better technology and better training.”
While there are many areas in which companies can cut corners to save money (double-sided photocopying, turning off some of the lights and reducing employee travel through heavier use of videoconferencing come to mind), the contact center is NOT the place to do it. It’s your front door…the first sight customers see when they try to make a connection. Most companies today would benefit from investing in newer contact center technologies that allow for flexible, integrated, omnichannel customer support; the use of analytics to find efficiencies, reduce costs and eliminate errors and redundant work as well as spot opportunities; better workforce management and quality monitoring; and a more robust knowledge base that is available to support agents very quickly.
Workforce management is one of those core technologies that can quickly reverse the trend of declining customer support. By ensuring that there are enough agents with the right skills working in the right channels at the right times, companies can quickly eliminate long hold-times, transfers and a lack of continuity in providing customers with answers via different channels. It also improves visibility into agent activity, and can help managers spot which agents are most likely to become overstressed, avoiding the “burnout chain” that can lead to apathetic agents undercutting customer relationships.
Want to save more money? Look into a demand response program with your energy provider to reduce energy consumption at peak times. Have employees turn off their computers every night before they leave. Put off the redecoration plans for the executive suite. But don’t skimp on customers, or they will return the favor.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi