Good Contact Center Staffing Saves Brands

As today’s business world continues to go global, it’s getting increasingly hard to deliver a product or service that is truly unrivaled. This makes customer service all the more important.

Brand perception is the differentiating factor, and smart businesses know that brand management starts with keeping the customer happy. Nowhere is this more important than when a customer calls to directly interact with a firm.

A national or international brand reputation is one thing, but it means little if the customer has a bad experience when directly interacting with the business. Worse, this bad individual experience cascades into a poor overall brand reputation as the customer’s experience is broadcast and shared on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter (News - Alert). Roughly 34 percent of social network users in America use social networks to rant about products and service, according to Harris Interactive, so keeping customers happy should be a prime concern.

For most customers, this direct interaction with a business comes principally through a call to the contact center of a business. So it is important to please customers who call.

While training agents properly and giving them the tools they need to resolve issues is important, an even more fundamental issue that is all too often overlooked is making sure that there are enough agents to quickly handle calls as they come into the contact center.

Callers wait an average of 12 minutes during peak times, according to Netcall (News - Alert), which has analyzed more than 2 million inbound calls. For the public sector it is even worse: A 30 minute wait, on average.

One mistake that many contact centers make is focusing on the total number of calls instead of the number of unique callers. If callers get their problems resolved the first time, thereby avoiding a callback, staff levels can be reduced. This can be tracked and monitored to determine if agents are handling calls properly.

Making sure that peak calling times are adequately staffed is also an obvious but often overlooked tactic for keeping the customer happy by answering calls in a timely manner. One of the busiest times during the week for a contact center is between 9 and 9:15am. The best call-handling team members should be scheduled for this slot, and managers should make a point to ensure that all agents are logged in and ready to take calls by 8:55am.

One trick that some contact center managers employ to deal with peak periods is leveraging non-telephone staff during these peak periods. Cross-training staff to handle calls is one way to deal with the rush of calls during peak hours.

Another trick is cross-training agents to handle other departmental inquiries. This reduces queue times and abandoned calls in any one section.

Specialist inquires and longer calls should also be directly transferred to a specialist, freeing up the transferring agent to take the next call.

Often the little things make a big difference. Like how long it takes a company to answer a customer’s concern.

Edited by Stefania Viscusi