How do I lower costs in my contact center?
Ask any contact center leader what keeps them up at night, and you will hear stories about an almost impossible balancing act.
You need to drive cost down without hurting customer service, lowering employee morale or creating compliance problems. You can’t be overstaffed, understaffed or poorly trained.
If that wasn’t enough, your customers demand that you value their time and give them the right answer.
We get it. We’ve helped thousands of leading brands and small businesses navigate these problems and win.
How do I balance overstaffing and understaffing?
Every contact center strategy ever written includes a chapter on preventing overstaffing and understaffing. However, it’s easier said than done.
You need to:
- Forecast call volumes and workloads – Are you aligning employee schedules to work volumes and arrivals?
- Gain visibility into employee activities – Do you know if employees are doing what they are supposed to be doing, when they are supposed to be doing it (adherence)?
- Change schedules quickly – Do your managers have the flexibility to adjust schedules on the fly?
- Remove silos – Can you share work across contact center teams?
We can help you improve with workforce optimization and pinpoint the optimal number and type of staff, so you can serve customers across channels while still allowing employees the scheduling flexibility they demand.
Whether your focus is on occupancy rate, average speed to answer, average handle time or dozens of other KPIs, we can make it easy to plan, forecast and quickly adapt to the real-time staffing and scheduling needs of your contact center.
How do I prepare my agents to answer a wider range of customer questions?
Do your customers feel like they know more about your products than your call center agents? With each new product, acquisition or location, it gets harder to answer increasingly complex customer questions.
You need to:
- Train employees – Can you deliver just-in-time or in-the-moment training?
- Provide automated helping hands – Can you provide real-time prompts to agents based on the conversation to help with their hard and soft skills?
- Help employees find answers – Do employees have a reliable source of answers at their fingertips?
- Manage quality – Can you listen to 100 percent of calls to quickly course correct, introduce new training or modify inefficient processes?
When your agents answer questions correctly the first time, you can lower your costs, improve retention and elevate CX.
Connecting performance, quality, and training helps make your agents more productive. Improving time to productivity helps lower costs and improves employee retention.
How do I solve customer issues faster?
Most consumers try to solve simpler issues on their own using self-service. The issues that do make it into the contact center are more complex than ever before.
You need to:
- Empower agents with reliable answers – Do you have a single repository of information that agents can easily search to find answers? Can you provide consistent information across phone, web, chat and other channels?
- Avoid making customers repeat themselves – If a customer starts solving a problem on the web, or via chat, can your phone agents see how the issue has progressed and pick up the conversation where it left off?
- Track long-running issues – When an issue is not fully resolved in the first interaction, are you sure the right steps are being taken to completely resolve the issue in the optimal way?
Nobody wants to be stuck in a long customer service conversation.
Empowering your agents with fast answers and a 360-degree view of the customer can help you solve customer issues faster. This can save you money while also valuing your customers’ time.
How do I avoid compliance penalties?
Most businesses are subject to at least one external regulation that governs data usage. The fines, reputational damage, and disruption to business that can follow a breach of those regulations can be substantial. But the resources needed to manage, control, retrieve and analyze the data required for compliance, can also be significant.
You need to:
- Build a culture of compliance – Are you making meeting internal and external regulatory requirements another component of your customer engagement strategy?
- Maintain and police procedures – Can you avoid non-compliance or deal with compliance issues quickly and effectively?
- Ensure data security – How do you keep data secure while making it easy to find, retrieve and analyze if required for audit and compliance purposes?
Taking a holistic approach to your compliance requirements, incorporating automated quality and operational assurance, secure data storage and retrieval, and sophisticated analysis tools can help you alleviate the compliance burden and turn regulatory adherence from pain to gain.