By Kay Phelps, Senior Manager, Avaya Contact Center Solutions
Standing in line to go through security screening at the airport, you’re likely to see rampant levels of impatience. Notice some passengers peering ahead to see which line is shortest. Others are hastily pulling off shoes and unearthing their laptops. If it’s close to departure time and the line slows to a crawl - or stops - you can almost feel your blood pressure rising.
Guess what? If your contact center is not handling your customers quickly and efficiently, their impatience is growing, too. But, unlike waiting in line for security at the airport, they have options. Most likely, your business is likely not the only game in town. If your customers spend too long waiting in queue, or if the agent doesn’t have the information they need at their fingertips, they may be surfing the web for your competitor’s number while they’re waiting. How do you keep your customers when the competition is just a mouse click away?
The answer is customer service technologies that help your company keep the pace your customers expect. The trend of rapidly shifting customer loyalty means that it is critical to your business to be immediately responsive. Your customers consider prompt customer service an entitlement.
To outpace your competition, you need tools that let you analyze your customers’ experience. Your agents are the front door to your business. When someone “walks in”, are they immediately greeted, and given the information they need? Or are they put on hold, or transferred, or kept waiting while their impatience grows?
Ensure your contact center reporting and analytical tools deliver the intelligence you need to be confident your customers are getting the service experience they expect. Your solution should enable you to compile all the pertinent agent-related metrics into a single agent behavior report so you can identify role model agent behavior and reward it. And, the same reports can help you to rapidly identify problem agent behaviors so you can quickly address them.
For example, your target for average talk time is 5 minutes. But you notice that one agent is consistently taking around 7 minutes for each call. Now, drill into the details and compare these metrics to business results. You rapidly learn that what initially seemed like a problem is, instead, a good thing. Although this agent is spending slightly more time with each customer, he is bringing in twice the revenue of other agents!
Ask your contact center vendor to provide reporting and analytical tools that let you start with the big picture summary, and then drill down on anomalies. What measures are outside the boundaries you’ve deemed acceptable? Drill down and learn the reason behind what you’re seeing. For example, if you’re seeing an excessive number of transfers, you may suspect that agents are dumping calls. But upon drilling into the details, you see that this trend started yesterday. Even your best agents are transferring a considerable number of calls – and all of them are being transferred to the same area. Upon investigation – oops! Your routing tables were changed yesterday, and these calls were being sent to the wrong agent group.
The bottom line is that you can’t intelligently manage what you don’t measure. Ensure your contact center reporting and analytical tools give you the intelligence you need to learn what’s working, and fix what isn’t, so you can readily fine-tune your customers’ experience. In this fast-paced world, when your customers are happy with the quality of service you’re providing, they’re not going to take time to check out the competition.