Simple Ways to Speed Up After-Call Work

“First tip, make sure the tasks your agents are performing are needed in the moment. The fewer tasks agents have to complete, the faster they’ll become available for the next incoming request.

Study a random sampling of agents’ after-call work, document each separate task that they perform, and the purpose it serves, and then ask yourself: is that purpose still justified?

Maybe you have agents entering details into multiple sources, or maybe they’re adding more detail than is actually necessary.

Depending on the sector you serve, up to 40% of contact centre time can be spent on repetitive admin, so there’s a good chance you’ll find tasks you can easily remove.”

“Next up, automate. Once you’ve evaluated which tasks agents are doing, the next tip is to automate as many of those as possible.

If you can’t remove them entirely, there are a lot of ways to automate processes so your agents don’t need to take time off the phone to do them.

For consistency, and efficiency, you can create reusable templates. How many different types of calls do your agents deal with daily?

Creating reusable templates, and workflows, can help reduce the time spent on after-call work. Additionally, by using conversational intelligence solutions you can automatically identify call reasons, call dispositions, and next best actions, and then use RPA, or other automation techniques, to kick off those triggers after, or even during, the call to reduce the number of things the agent needs to remember to take care of once the call is complete.

Automating at least some of the repetitive tasks with advanced AI-powered contact centre software solutions can cut down the amount of manual work for agents, freeing them up for more productive activities, and reducing your overall ACW time.”

“With today’s technology you can easily automate tasks like creating call summaries, updating CRM records, and managing follow-ups.

In fact, AI-generated call summaries have become so effective they warrant their own mention, and are my third and final tip. Creating call summaries often accounts for the bulk of the after-call work time. It’s also highly repetitive, which makes it a strong candidate for automation.

As AI is advancing so is the accuracy, and usefulness, of AI-generated summaries. While you might want agents to review and edit the summaries, at least initially, AI-generated summaries have been shown to provide better consistency, and less bias, on their own.

Over time, you’ll likely find the generated summaries are better than the edited versions, but to get started, approving or adding to the auto-generated text is far easier, and less time consuming, than writing an entire summary from scratch.”