5 Ways To Optimise Your
Contact Centre Performance
By Nikki Quinn, Business Consultant
As an operational consultant within IP Integration, my role is to work with our contact centre clients to help them continually improve the performance of their contact centres. Key to this is putting in place all of the component technology applications that help to drive productivity and the efficiency and effectiveness of the operation. In future editions of Connection I will be driving down into each of these components and sharing with you how other organisations are combining technology with best practices to optimise performance.
To kick things off, I would like to share five areas where IP Integration and I are helping organisations to improve performance and achieve greater productivity.
Optimising Resources
We all know that one of the highest costs of a contact centre is the people. Ensuring that you have enough people to handle the peaks in call volumes is critical however, go too far the other way and overstaff your contact centre and you are creating unnecessary cost.
Contact centres of any size can benefit greatly from a Workforce Management solution; this enables you to use historic call volume metrics to help you plan the resourcing of your contact centre. You are able to align the skills of your agents with predicted call volumes to develop shift patterns that optimise your staffing level ensuring you can meet call volumes while making sure you keep staff costs to a minimum.
Managing Quality & Performance
Ensuring that you provide a consistent high quality service to your customer regardless of which agent they speak to is a challenge. So to is identifying the gaps in your agents’ knowledge and skills in order to direct coaching and training.
We are helping organisations to implement recording and quality management solutions to address this issue. By selectively recording agents’ calls and then using a structured and comprehensive quality evaluation application, you are able to measure and therefore manage the quality in your contact centre.
This enables you to drive continuous improvement right down to the individual agent providing them with timely feedback, an objective assessment of their performance and developing them through coaching and best practice clips.
Increasing First Call Resolution
There are two main factors that have an impact on your ability to resolve customer enquiries first time. The first is being able to route the call, first time, to the most appropriate agent to deal with that enquiry. Second, is then ensuring that agent has all of the skills, knowledge and tools required to handle the call.
The first step is ensuring that you have effective call routing in place; by utilising call classification to filter calls as they arrive you are able to instantly identify why the customer is calling you and then utilise skill based routing to ensure they are passed to an agent capable of dealing with their enquiry.
The second step is to understand both the reason and nature of calls you are receiving – customer insight and an understanding of the capabilities of your agents – agent performance management. By overlaying analytics on recorded calls you are able to gain valuable insight into both your customers and the way you deal with their enquiries. You are able to identify trends where repeat calls are common and understand why this is the case and what steps need to be taken to address them.
Avoiding, Avoidable Calls
In a similar manner to increasing first call resolution by utilising analytics you are also able to identify those calls that are ideal candidates for automating. Most contact centres have calls that do not require agent involvement and as such are causing unnecessary and avoidable workload for your contact centre.
By understanding the nature of these calls you are able to introduce either IVR or web-based self-service applications. By introducing these as positive service enhancements to your customers, i.e. extended hours service, quicker and more effective service, everyone wins.
Blending Multi-Media
I am seeing many contact centres introducing multi-media services to their customers. For example, publishing email addresses, introducing web-chat and even communicating by SMS. This poses a whole new set of challenges; what is an acceptable response time for an email? How do I blend agents across multiple media?, etc.
Multi-media provides significant advantages to both you and your customers. Your customers get to communicate with you in the manner that best suits them. You are able to blend calls with non-real time communication in order to balance agent workload.
To achieve this effectively you not only require the technology to support the multiple media, but you need to ensure you have in place the right processes, training and management to ensure that you remain responsive to your customers regardless of how they choose to contact you.
If you would like to discuss the current challenges you are facing with your contact centre and learn more about how we are helping other organisations, please feel free to contact the IP Integration team on 0118 918 4600 or contact me directly at nikki.quinn@ipintegration.com