Call Center Management Featured Article
Are 'Ghost Calls' Haunting Your Contact Center?
It’s months past Halloween, but many contact centers are experiencing an uptick in the number of “ghost calls” they’re fielding. You know the type: the phone rings, but there’s no one there. You’re not sure if the customer has abandoned the call or is speaking and you’re simply not hearing. It makes you start to wonder whose fault it is, particularly if instances are escalating. Your telecom service could be to blame. So too could your contact center systems. Or maybe it’s your agents?
The problem is that, in a heavy traffic contact center environment, it isn’t going to be easy to diagnose.
“Contact centers are some of the most complex environments,” wrote Sorell Slaymaker for No Jitter. “It’s common for an interaction between caller and agent to go through 10 different systems, which in turn interact with another 20-plus systems on the back end.”
So which of those systems is to blame? Here’s where you need to become the Sherlock Holmes of the contact center. Some tools you can use include:
Robust reporting capabilities. Your telephony solutions offer reporting capabilities and call detail records, so make liberal use of them. You’ll need to check every point the calls are going through to identify where the problem is occurring.
“Many contact centers use a session border controller to create a unique call ID for each call,” wrote Slaymaker. “This enables them to track a call as it goes through various systems. The greatest chance for audio problems to occur is in the transfer process.”
Protect against SPIT. In some cases, ghost calls are the result of Spam over Internet Telephony (News - Alert). If you’re using a VoIP system, it’s possible that bad actors are probing your IP address with a SIP dialer looking for an easy way to set up call forwarding for nefarious purposes. If your SIP phone is sending a response to the probe, it might be ringing with a ghost call to let hackers know they’ve found a viable SIP end-point to exploit. One solution is to create a firewall rule that blocks all inbound SIP packets except those that originate from the SIP server's IP addresses.
Examine the work processes. An overly complex work environment could be to blame. Using a good desktop analytics solution, you can easily identify and prioritize work process issues that could be “ghosting” customers. By eliminating unnecessary process steps, you can reduce the chances of mistakes and improve workflow to boost the customer experience.
To better find the ghost calls to diagnose them, consider adding “ghost call” as a reason code to agents’ desktops. With the calls tagged, it will be easier to find them and understand what’s going on. Ghost calls aren’t just frustrating for customers, they’re wasting agent time and productivity, as well.
Edited by Maurice Nagle