Contact centers have only one chance to create a favorable first impression on customers, which is particularly important in today’s fast-paced business world. Customers expect a consistently high-quality experience from contact centers, no matter which communication channel they’re using. Creating a productive environment in your contact center generally requires you to accurately evaluate agent performance and use that information to heighten the quality of customer experience (CX). The following five tips can help improve your contact center efficiency.
1. Use data reporting tools.
The right data reporting technology is essential for helping agents do their job better. Contact centers must be able to extract historical and real-time data from their sources and convert it into information that provides useful insight into your business operations. Data reporting tools should have multi-channel capability since agents no longer use the phone alone to communicate with customers.
Feedback is also a vital data source for evaluating a contact center’s performance as well as that of individual agents. For instance, feedback reports routinely use the net promoter score (NPS) to measure a customer’s overall satisfaction with the contact center.
2. Record metrics.
Metrics provide a contact center with benefits such as identifying its ideal level of staffing. Some of these metrics may be classified into the following categories:
- Call volume – crucial for determining if your contact center needs to adjust its staffing.
- Queue metrics – such as average queue time and longest queue time – strong indicators of the CX quality in your contact center.
- Occupancy – the percentage of time that active agents spend with a customer, including time spent communicating with customers and after-call work.
- Real-time status – the percentage of time that on-duty agents spend communicating with customers.
3. Create informative, but natural scripts.
Contact centers must handle calls quickly while still providing customers with the information they need. Meeting both of these needs at the same time requires contact centers to use scripts, but it’s also important that agents sound as natural as possible. Agents in a modern call center need to have strong soft skills like empathy to help them respond to queries in a natural manner. Well-written scripts also allow agents to focus on solving the customer’s problem instead of simply reciting canned verbiage.
4. Reduce burnout.
Contact centers often attempt to maximize occupancy without regard to any other consideration. However, some downtime is essential if agents are to avoid burnout, especially your highest performers. You should also encourage open communication between agents and supervisors to monitor agent engagement. Another way to minimize burnout is by publishing key performance indicator (KPI) goals and explaining how you set them. Additional tips for preventing burnout include maintaining a commitment to developing your agents’ skills, including ongoing training.
5. Implement targeted routing.
Personalized service is a key requirement for providing the best possible CX, which requires routing customers to the agent who can best assist them. However, targeted routing must ensure that the agent receiving the call has both the knowledge and authority needed to help the customer. It must also reach the appropriate agent the first time since multiple redirects will defeat the goal of improving CX and needlessly increase call volume. Proper use of the IVR system can help segment customers according to their needs, thus helping to create the best match between agent and customer.
Improving your contact center’s efficiency can’t be accomplished overnight. It requires a close look at your metrics and careful analysis to identify the areas in greatest need of improvement. However, the investment you make in these resources can pay for itself in the long run.
Also, on the subject of resources, Aceyus delivers next-generation solutions to contact centers, helping them improve their efficiency. Our data reporting tools also provide insight into your metrics to ensure you maintain the optimum staffing level. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help your contact center.
