Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Save Thousands of Dollars in Attrition Costs with Speech Analytics
The role of the call center has always been an important one – serve as the first point of contact for the customer. In this role, call center agents are charged with answering calls and other forms of communications, delivering quality interactions, solving problems, selling products or services and calming the frustrated customer. It’s a lot to handle and the expectation to do it well puts on the pressure.
That pressure is one of the reasons why call center agents don’t always stick around. The job seems easy enough in theory, but attrition rates are high, costing the call center department thousands more than it should. A constant stream of turnover makes it more difficult to deliver the consistent quality experience and can make call center scheduling a nightmare.
Fortunately, high attrition doesn’t just have to be an accepted byproduct of the call center environment. There are tools available that can help agents get better acclimated to the role and more skilled at interacting on a number of different levels, without letting the pressure mount. To explore one tool available, we’ve turned to call center scheduling solution provider, Monet Software (News - Alert) and the company’s recent blog on the topic.
In this piece, Monet Software suggests that we look in an unlikely place to help reduce attrition – speech analytics. This tool tends to be focused on performance as it enables the transformation of voice data into business intelligence. As a result, analytics can help improve the customer experience, agent performance, regulatory compliance, sales effectiveness, first call resolution, issue resolution and the overall quality of service.
Reducing attrition is noticeably missing from this list, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a connection. A closer look at why agents are leaving and it makes sense that speech analytics can make a difference. Some leave as a result of ineffective training. Others leave as they believe their evaluations do not actually reflect their performance. And some view the job as one that should lead to additional opportunities or incentives that don’t actually materialize.
If speech analytics software is used to handle agent scoring, supervisors don’t have to spend as much time on agent evaluations, coaching sessions have the potential to be more precise when addressing a specific issue and better training can produce better performance. Plus, individualized attention helps the agent feel as though he or she is more valued by the company. When that happens, agents are happier, deliver better customer experiences and tend to stick around. As a result, call center scheduling is much easier to do efficiently.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi