3rd Party Remote Call Monitoring Feature

3^rd party remote call monitoring can be used to not only drive customer satisfaction but also dramatically increase business efficiency when used correctly. A recent study from BPA International, written by Craig Antonucci, director of Client Strategies, MBA and professor of Decision Sciences, points out some of the ways this is done.

First, determine critical activities. What activities make or break your call center? If you are a 911 dispatcher, being able to get the emergency group to the right home is the critical activity. Be sure to identify these critical activities and make them high focus, key measurements, and high penalty for failure at the agent level. If you fail to measure this, you might as well be the cook who doesn’t wash his hands.

Next, emphasize issue resolution. It is important to reinforce your agent’s success or failure to resolve the issue. If your agents can effectively be measured and managed by those factors, most likely you will see success in this type of measurement.  Be careful with this one though, don’t make it the driver for performance. Telling your agents that they did or did not solve the customer’s issue will not make them perform better. You need to tell them why they did or didn’t, and if they didn’t, tell them how they are supposed to solve the problem. By spending time training and reinforcing them on the activities that lead to Issue resolution, you will see this factor affected 10 fold vs. measuring this factor alone.

Third, measure for customer relationships. Your customers want to feel like you care. They spend their hard-earned money with you, and in return they want to feel important. Acknowledging the customer’s issue with empathy, using their name in the call, engaging in conversation during dead air…all these things go a long way in turning a clinical service call into a personal relationship between your company and the customer.  

Fourth, find ROI in customer satisfaction. Of all the ROI factors, this historically has been the most difficult one to quantify. Common sense dictates that a happy customer costs less than an unhappy customer, but tying this level of satisfaction to a dollar figure has always been difficult. Happy customers remain customers, refer their friends and associates and tend to spend more freely with your organization which all make you more money. Unhappy customers cancel, spend less and tell their friends bad things about your company, which costs you money.

Last but not least, lower call volumes. For every call you can eliminate from happening, you don’t have to spend the money on that contact. This will require fewer agents, less management, less telephony, and less infrastructure. In an outsourced environment, this can manifest itself in direct savings if your contract is based on a per call formula.

Want to learn more about the latest in communications and technology? Then be sure to attend ITEXPO East 2012, taking place Jan. 31-Feb. 3 2012, in Miami, FL. ITEXPO (News - Alert) offers an educational program to help corporate decision makers select the right IP-based voice, video, fax and unified communications solutions to improve their operations. It's also where service providers learn how to profitably roll out the services their subscribers are clamoring for – and where resellers can learn about new growth opportunities. To register, click here.

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