Knowledge experts assist Call Centre agents and Supervisors

According to research conducted for Aspect Software, 10.3 per cent of all telephone inquiries handled by contact centre agents and supervisors now require assistance from knowledge workers in other departments.

This figure covers instances where customers are placed on hold while agents and supervisors glean specific answers from knowledge workers, and instances when customer calls are transferred to these experts.

Supervisors and agents aren’t reaching out to one particular function for support; they are asking for help from a multitude of subject matter experts across the enterprise:

- 25 per cent of the time they seek assistance on technical details
- 25 per cent of the time they get help from financial, insurance or casualty experts
- 50 per cent of the time they require support from upper management, sales and collections, distribution-related functions, legal, retail, and a variety of other departments

One half of supervisors, and one third of agents, say each inquiry requires approximately two interactions - whether the problem is handled entirely by contact centre personnel or includes support from a knowledge worker - to resolve a customer issue fully. These same respondents state that calls involving experts in the enterprise take approximately two-and-a-half minutes longer than those handled exclusively in the contact centre.

“By extending a unified communications strategy to encompass customer-facing processes, enterprises can leverage the routing, reporting, queuing, workflow, workforce management and scheduling, monitoring, training and coaching processes and applications that have been honed by the contact centre”, said Mike Sheridan, Sr. Vice President, Marketing and Strategy, Aspect Software. “These applications can then be extended across all customer-facing employees - even enterprise-based knowledge workers - to enable them to shorten problem resolution cycles, quickly answer customer inquiries and more effectively up-sell services or products to perspective customers.”

The research finding is based on telephone and online interviews conducted in December 2007 with 50 customer service contact centre supervisors and 50 customer service agents/representatives. The research was conducted by Chicago-based Leo J. Shapiro & Associates LLC, an independent market research firm.