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How Dispositions Can Boost Profit

By Steve Anderson, Contributing Writer

While the exact position of disposition is something of a gray area--agents hate dealing with them and many managers alternate between loving them and disregarding them as just another check box on a report. But, for those who are willing to take the extra step and use them as an extra metric, they may well be able to boost profits by providing a better overall customer experience.

It may sound like a bit of a roundabout path to reaching that conclusion, but the simple fact remains that customers are more likely to buy when they're having a good customer service experience. Thus, using dispositions correctly can help mean the difference between a positive and a negative customer service experience.

As mentioned earlier, one of the biggest obstacles is getting agents to perform dispositioning tasks. The obvious solution is to simply command the staff to perform the task, but this more often results in accuracy problems. Commanding the agents to perform dispositioning will often have the agents declare most of the calls of a "general" disposition just for the sake of performing the required task, and that yields information, but information that's of a largely faulty nature. Thus, some will get the QA team involved as a kind of secondary check on the system, and still others will take the process a step farther instituting small contests for those who match up best with QA's results.

This in turn allows call center agents to not only get a better handle on why customers are calling, but also give them a better idea of how to solve problems. When problems get solved, customers are much happier, and as is becoming much more widely known, happy customers are more likely to buy.

Using dispositions properly, treating them as more than just one more check box on a list or one more hoop to jump through to keep a job, is a great way to improve the customer service experience. With an improved customer experience in hand, it increases the likelihood of better sales, and from there, better profits.

It's not axiomatic, but it does provide an increased probability of achieving those kinds of results, and the end result is one everyone wants to see. Well, everyone except the competitors for the business that uses such methods, of course.

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