What It Takes to Make a Contact Center Great

To be successful, contact centers need to get a lot of things right. The factors that help make that happen include people, processes, productivity, and technology.

Only with the right mix of these things can contact centers satisfy (or even delight) customers, control costs, and drive loyalty and new revenues.

The People

Agent and manager wages make up the bulk of contact center costs. And that makes sense, since these individuals do most of the work in these environments and deliver most of the value.

The Processes

That said, contact centers should spend the time and money to recruit, hire, and onboard the best possible agent and manager candidates. They should continue to coach them and provide them opportunities for reward and promotion. And they should recognize them when they exceed expectations and give them greater flexibility when they bring special value to the contact center.

The Productivity

Hiring the right people, training them, and providing them with the tools and guidance they need to get the job done can go a long way toward driving contact center productivity.

Creating a positive contact center culture can help too, by energizing rather than draining agents, and giving them a shared sense of purpose. Offering incentives and creating contests also can help create employee engagement.

The Technology

To make the most out of their valuable human resources, contact centers may want to consider investing in workforce management and optimizations solutions. These solutions can build in training time to agent schedules. They can ensure adequate number and type of team members are available to meet the requirements of the contact center at any given time. And they can provide managers greater flexibility in scheduling agents, and agents the ability to use self-service interfaces to submit their shift preferences and to swap shifts with colleagues.

Meanwhile, contact center monitoring technology, like recording solutions and speech analytics, can help managers understand per-agent performance and adherence. That way they can reward great work and offer guidance where it’s needed. And cloud-based contact centers can enable agents to work remotely – either every time, as a perk, or to keep things up and running in the event of unexpected events like inclement weather.

Edited by Maurice Nagle