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Contact Centers Can Balance Profit and Customer Satisfaction

Call Recording Featured Article

Contact Centers Can Balance Profit and Customer Satisfaction

January 07, 2016

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By Tara Seals,
Contributing Writer
 


When it comes to cost-efficiency for contact centers, it’s important to balance profit goals with customer loyalty and retention. To achieve the perfect balance, a few workforce optimization best practices can lead the way.

For one, companies should be able to calculate the cost of a call per minute in their contact center. According to Wynand Smit, CEO at INOVO, this can be calculated by working out time spent talking to customers divided by the total cost of the contact center environment, including salaries, the floor costs and other infrastructural requirements.


“This can then be used to benchmark and measure the efficiency of your workforce and processes and its subsequent impact on the overall profitability of your contact center,” he explained in a column.

From there, it’s important to track agent performance across a range of indicators, like call duration and call-to-sale conversion ratios. Usually this is done via a contact center dashboard for managers.

“Performance management tools can be used to find out who the most expensive agents are,” said Smit. “The agents making the fewest or longest calls are likely to be the most expensive. Once identified, you can optimize the performance of those agents by checking to see if further training is necessary, and ensuring that they are productive and able to work efficiently with the tools provided.”

Another goal that can be addressed by workforce optimization is interaction cost reduction. Giving customers automation options through self-service, leveraging chat or texting, or responding via social media allows an opportunity to address customer needs fast, while reducing costs. But there’s another benefit: This also serves to build up intelligence that tracks the propensity of customers to settle across different mediums.

“Interactive messaging provides cost-effective alternatives to voice calls and has a level of contact that secures people’s attention and informs or negotiates in real-time,” Smit said. “Recording and interpreting this data then enables visibility to track ideal contact methods on a group or even customer level.”

Optimization also boosts customer satisfaction while reducing costs by allowing functions like routing a second query back to the original agent to prevent the customer having to repeat details, or using a screen-pop to verify a customer’s information.

“The ultimate goal is to use improved efficiency and productivity to build customer relationships and drive profitability from the ground up,” Smit said. “It’s an ongoing process as the business matures; optimized processes throughout the customer experience, from initial contact to conclusion, can build customer retention, loyalty and satisfaction, and that’s the primary focus of any company with a contact center.”




Edited by Rory J. Thompson
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