Workforce Management Featured Article
To Achieve Optimal Contact Center Performance - Listen to Those on the Frontline
In the quest to deliver quality customer interactions, how much of your attention is spent on your agents? Chances are you do make investments in technology to support the proper interaction channels, measure performance and put incentives in place for improvements. These are all important and effective, but do they hit the workforce management targets you need to hit for success?
While some may believe they have what they need in place to be a high performer in the call center space, a failure to give the agent base a voice may leave holes in the strategy. Believe it or not, agents have their own ideas about their industry and they’re in the perfect position to gain insights. A recent blog by workforce management solution provider, Monet Software (News - Alert) explored the findings of a recent survey of 250 call center agents. The findings from this survey were nothing short of interesting.
In an age where the push is towards the omnichannel experience and the opportunity for self-service, 47 percent of agents still believe the telephone interaction provides the best opportunity to resolve a customer’s situation. A distant second place was web chat with just 26 percent of agents believing this is the optimal channel.
A staggering 90 percent of agents reported a belief that there will always be a need for the calling capability of the contact center. Is this just job security for agents reporting? Maybe – but many highlighted that it’s simply easier for a customer to talk through a problem rather than typing out a long explanation.
Agents are also paying attention to the balance they need to achieve between wrapping up a call quickly and hitting the KPIs that managers put in place. They don’t necessarily want to sacrifice customer satisfaction for wrapping up the call more quickly. Nearly 40 percent of agents do try and complete calls within 5-10 minutes; 32 percent will take the extra time if the customer needs the attention in order to resolve the issue.
The perpetual problem of being on hold was also up for discussion as agents had an opinion in this matter as well. While it’s common that more customers will call at a certain time than the number of agents available to answer their calls, it doesn’t mean that the simple hold is the optimal response. Virtual queuing is supported by 81 percent of agents, although they recognize that customers may get even more frustrated if they opt to call back when they will have immediate access to an agent, yet forget to do so.
Perhaps one of the most positive findings from this survey is that agents really do care about their jobs and their customers. In fact, 98 percent feel a sense of duty to the client and want to provide the optimal customer experience. To that end, it just makes sense to put workforce management solutions in place that support this effort and produce better outcomes.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi