You can have the best call center solution on the market, but if you don’t have the right partner, you’re likely wasting your money on features that aren’t going to be effectively implemented. Simply put, the most extravagant contact center can’t save you from poor implementation. On the flip side, any quality contact center solution, when implemented correctly, can save you big dollars in productivity and efficiency.
The most significant expense in a contact center is the labor cost. Serious contact center solutions on the market have several tools to help you maximize productivity. Think about this: if a few small tweaks can save 5-10 percent of labor costs, doesn’t increased efficiency become a game changer for your organization?
Here are 8 incredible productivity tools that your contact center solution should have:
1. Smarter call routing
The goal is to get the calls routed to the right person as quickly and efficiently as possible. A good contact center system features skills-based routing to ensure calls, emails and chats are handled by the right person with the skills to address the caller’s issue.
2. Overflow routing
Advanced systems will allow you to program overflow routing, enabling calls to be routed to primary, secondary, tertiary groups, etc. If nobody is available in the primary group, the system will include the secondary group in addition to the primary group. If those queues fill up, the system can add the third group and so forth.
3. Hierarchical routing
Assign prioritization of your agents based on weighted factors you designate, such as their specific skillset, language or product knowledge. That way you can quickly route calls with limited manual interference and ensure the best customer experience possible.
4. Customer Service Level reports
These reports should provide the number of incoming calls, abandoned calls, average wait times for answered and abandoned calls and average time to handle calls. You can set parameters such as the percentage of calls you want to handle live in a designated span of time. From those specifications, the customer service level report issues a grade of service.
5. Agent Productivity reports
Almost every contact center manager goes right to these reports to determine how well agents are performing. These reports show how many calls were offered to and handled by an agent. Instead of focusing on the number of calls each agent fields, look at how long the agent spends with clients. Any outliers can be assessed at a deeper level to find out if the agent is offering clients the best service, or if they are simply mismanaging the call, transferring, hanging up or otherwise trying to beat the system.
6. Call recording
Call recording in the contact center is becoming almost mandatory. Not only is this required in some situations for compliance reasons, it’s essential for training purposes. Some systems can be programmed to record a designated number of calls for each agent to allow for closer supervision. Pair that with the agent productivity report and you have a recipe for improving effectiveness of any agent, with the capability of highlighting particularly good (or bad) calls to train other agents, and to offer intelligent feedback during performance reviews.
7. Self-service options
Many contact centers offer customers self-service features, such as emails with tracking information or getting an account balance delivered through AI, instead of requiring live agents to perform these functions. The features are nominal in cost compared to their potential to save hours per week of labor costs.
8. AI features
The AI options coming out now for contact center solutions are incredible time savers. They can help website visitors find information they need, reducing call load, and they can function in webchat to assist the call center rep by feeding them information from a database based on the conversation that the rep is having with the customer. The most amazing thing about AI is if something is not in the AI database, the AI can continuously monitor the rep’s work and learn from it.
Gregg Communications – Contact Center Experts for Over 50 Years
Gregg Communications has been working with Chicago-area contact centers large and small for over 50 years, advising on the best strategies to solve challenges, advance the contact centers goals and expertly implement the right contact center solutions and features for each customer with which we work. No two contact centers are alike, and we believe you should partner with experts who take the time to understand your operations, needs, challenges and customers before recommending and implementing a solution, so you get the most from your contact center solution.
Is your contact center configured to save you money? Contact us to find out.