It is already New Year and the right time to act on the resolutions you have planned for your contact center. It is time to change your status of ‘in-planning’ to ‘put into action’ and bring the much-awaited change in delivering exceptional customer experience. So, without wasting any extra minute of this year, let’s look at the actionable you need to act upon,
1. Understand and state contact center expectations
Revisit the organization’s strategies, opportunities, and issues to finalize the action items. Any change in software, gadget, training, hiring, and more depends on the contact center’s expectation for the year. Business operations should not change too often, and confuse the staff; instead, the contact center should evaluate the right metrics to manage the workforce, improve customer experience and increase ROI. So, once you are ready with expectations and calculations, its time to fix the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and do performance management
2. Manage performance
What do you think, a customer calling your contact center expects a personalized interaction or a quick resolution? The answer is both, along with ease of handling their query. This creates a high level of customer experience, and to maintain this; you need to maintain and manage performance with KPIs and customer interactions happening at the contact center.
Contact center performance is assessed based on qualitative and quantitative KPIs basis the data accumulated from AHT, wait time, conversions, etc. Whereas, for customer satisfaction and experience quality, you need to consider CSAT and NPS.
3. Consider the most crucial KPI, i.e., time
Time is an essential metric for any contact center as it approximately analyses how many calls an agent will be able to handle in a day. Here, you need to consider handle time, wrap-up time and experience time. Handle time includes the talk time, hold time, and wrap-up time (after call work). Experience time includes IVR, queue time, ring time, talk time and hold time. So, your contact center should not focus only on reducing the handling time with a stopwatch in front; instead, concentrate on having clear communication to fix things considering time.
Hold time is another essential metrics to consider for reducing the abandon rate. Abandon rate helps you get the percentage of calls or customers who leave the call even before speaking to an agent, especially when put on hold. So, you end up having several dissatisfied customers and lower conversions. You need to understand the reason for the increasing hold time. It can be
- Understaffed contact center
- Inefficient agents
- Agents unavailable on customers’ preferred platform or time
4. Improve agent’s productivity
Agents’ productivity is not just about how many calls they handle in a day. You need to consider if calls have been resolved and how long did the call last for, what’s the wrap time, the number of breaks, adherence to schedule, and more. This year you need to understand that agent experience cannot be taken for granted anymore, else your contact center will face a higher churn and so will your customers. You need to take care of an agent’s flexibility of working from anywhere along with enhancing their knowledge level for exceptional customer experience.
Not to forget, contact center software plays a crucial role in amplifying agent’s productivity. So, avoid any delay in selecting the best agent desktop that offers a unified view of customer information to agents even before the call is answered. And integration is the major hurdle for agents in providing an exceptional customer experience. Also, you need to understand in-built gadgets are an excellent help for agents to perform exceptionally well with improved FCR. These gadgets can be agent scripting tools, knowledgebase, ticketing, customer management, etc.
5. Achieve customer satisfaction
Customer satisfaction helps analyze customer’s association period, assure word-of-mouth marketing of their positive experience. In addition to working on the KPIs, to better understand customers and their thought about your service, you need to conduct surveys via SMS, email, web-chat, rating, review request, etc. Metrics to consider surveys are
- CSAT – the percentage of customers satisfied with your service
- Net Promoter Score (NPS) – customer’s willingness to recommend your company
- Customer effort score – perception about ease of resolving issues
A higher CSAT score displays customer interaction was too quick and not a friendly one. Whereas low NPS might indicate that agent engagement was cooperative, but the issue is still unresolved.
6. Keep the agents positive and active
Your contact center needs to have active agents who are excited to view their real-time performance on the wallboard and have inter-team interaction. This helps resolve calls quickly and fill the knowledge gap. Further, the positivity is carried to customer interactions that build better business rapport along with increased sales opportunities.
So, stop discussing the resolutions and start brainstorming and working on them to grow your contact center business.
