By Mark Lepko, President North America, Altitude Software
How many times have you called a contact center, were unable get a conclusive answer in the first interaction, and were forced to call again and again repeating the same story to a different agent? Many times I’m sure, like the rest of us that increasingly use contact centers for so many things.
This happens because few companies are focused on the customer experience and do not provide agents with the necessary information to complete a successful contact resolution, on the first call. Additionally the agents are under pressure to perform to certain statistics such as Talk Time, or Calls Handled per Hour, to name a few.
First Call Resolution is increasingly becoming an issue for contact centers worldwide since it has a significant impact on the bottom line and also on customer satisfaction. The ROI to reduce a 2nd call for the same inquiry are really quite significant when you consider that in some cases, it is believed that as many as 50% of the calls could have been handled correctly on the first call.
Although the problem is identified the solution is not easy to implement. It requires a combination of providing training/coaching to agents, defining the right processes and the appropriate technology infrastructure. This article focuses on the latter point, identifying the building blocks for a successful First Call Resolution contact center.
It is crucial that the customer is correctly identified in the first call. Customers are easily identified using the ANI (automatic number identification); however, if the customer uses a different number, or is blocking their ANI, it is impossible to identify the customer.
Voice Portals allow customers to identify themselves using a traditional IVR or speech recognition application. If the customer is identified and has already selected the reason for calling, a routing system can route the interaction to the most appropriate agent based on a number of variables, such as the customer segment, issue type, location and other relevant information in the database.
Routing the interaction to the most appropriate agent is already an outstanding customer service. The next step is to ensure that the agent has quick and complete access to all relevant information, including the appropriate campaign script.
A Unified Agent Desktop is essential for agents to be efficient and effective in helping customers with queries. Since agents have to manage multiple interaction channels, business applications, and guide the conversation with the customer through a script all the information must be a click away; otherwise the agent may not be able to get the right answer within an acceptable period of time and will have to put the customer on hold until retrieving the application with the appropriate data. The unified desktop not only saves time, but also optimizes the agent performance having a direct impact on contact center bottom line.
A Knowledge base, which can sit behind the unified desktop works with the agent campaign script to gather the information captured on the desktop to present the best answer on the topic to the agent. This can often increase handling times as these systems are not perfect, but as we mentioned earlier, the emphasis needs to be on getting the call resolved as quickly as possible, and on the first call.
Quality Monitoring/Recording tools are excellent ways of learning after the fact what went right and wrong, and improve in areas of training, but this again is after the call is over. Tied in to the Unified Desktop, the monitoring/recording can be automatically launched based on where the agent is in the campaign script. Many of these tools have evolved to include real-time capabilities to capture information that can improve first call resolution on the spot. These include speech analytics and word spotting, so that supervisors and agents can be alerted during the call if there is a negative turn in the customer’s tone, long pauses of silence indicating frustration, or the customer is starting to mention a competitor, or in fact is talking about returning the product, or requesting a refund. With this information an agent can be coached or directly assisted by the supervisor to turn around a situation that is not going well.
In conclusion, the creation of First Call Resolution Contact Center requires focus from the organization to make it a priority. It also requires a Unified Desktop to guide the agent through the call, with information captured from the Voice Portal, fed into a Knowledge Base, and can receive interactive coaching from Speech Analytics and Monitoring tools tied in with the Unified Desktop.
Creating a First Call Resolution oriented contact center is a bumpy road, but keep your eye on the goals and consider that your investment will pay in terms of the keeping the cost downs and, perhaps more important, significantly improving customer satisfaction.
About Mark Lepko
Mark Lepko’s mission at Altitude is to drive sales, professional services, and technical support to meet and exceed customer demands in North America. Mark Lepko has over 20 years experience in the contact center industry. Mark began his career managing large scale call center operations with both inbound and outbound applications. He has broad experience leading teams with engagements in the Retail, Outsourcing, Utility, Financial Services, and Automotive industries. Mark holds a degree in Economics from Drexel University.
About Altitude (www.altitude.com)
Altitude Software (www.altitude.com) is a leading independent contact centre vendor, with its Altitude Unified Customer Interaction™ (Altitude uCI) product line. The Altitude uCI is a suite of customer interaction management solutions for customer service; help desks; collections; order desks; proactive telemarketing, sales and service; and business process management. It manages and improves customer relationships for each new interaction in a wide range of contact centers, from SMEs to large multisite organizations with a special focus on contact center outsourcers.
Altitude uCI is a cost-effective application suite conceived to improve the overall productivity of the contact centre. Since Altitude uCI was engineered to integrate easily with enterprise front office and back-office systems, Altitude uCI delivers significant cost benefits, revenue benefits, and intangible benefits with a limited upfront investment. Altitude uCI not only allows users to achieve return on investment in a limited time frame, but also provides a successful solution to their customer interaction and organizational efficiency strategies.