Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Turning the Customer Experience Around in 2015
It’s that time of year when businesses, and in particular contact centers, begin examining their existing processes to look for ways to save money and boost operations during the year to come. While there are many ways to do this, it’s advised to start with the areas that will make the biggest positive impact on call center operations.
An effective schedule is one of the most important tools a contact center can build in order to succeed. With a good schedule, companies can ensure coverage of all telephone calls and other media to ensure customers never wait for responses. They can be certain the right people are on the right communications media at the right time, and that customers are always receiving an optimal experience. Unfortunately, it’s also one of the most difficult processes to get right.
Customers hate being left on hold. (Customers hate a lot of things, but being put on hold ranks higher than almost everything else.) Long hold times aren’t great for businesses, either. They drive away customers and cause revenue to be lost. Customer goodwill, which is hard to win, easy to lose and nearly impossible to get back, can go up in a puff of smoke in one five-minute long hold session.
According to a recent blog post by Customer Think’s David Miller, there are several ways exist to ease a customer’s on-hold frustration and boost call center performance simultaneously. One of the most important is offering a callback feature to customers when wait times exceed an acceptable threshold. According to research from Forrester (News - Alert), about three quarters of today’s customers say they would prefer being called back than waiting on hold.
“The point is you need to find smart sways like this to drive performance at your inbound call center,” wrote Miller. “Solutions like this boost both profits and competitiveness. They also boost survivability.”
Another important way to improve the customer experience is to empower agents to make more autonomous decisions, rather than forcing to act like a wheel in a big machine. Customers hate this, and agents often resent the restraints put on them when they could be offering genuine solutions to a customer.
“Internal policies can often hold agents back,” wrote Miller. “The more complicated your internal policies the harder it is for agents to help customers. While internal policies are important, give your agents permission to go off script when necessary, which can boost first call resolution rates.”
It may seem like you’re helping when you script agents down to every last element of the call, but to the customer, it’s providing the impression that he or she is speaking with a robot. An agent who can’t use her ingenuity to help a customer is never going to be able to provide excellent customer support.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi