Jason Roos outlines common industry pitfalls and how you can avoid them.
Getting the basics right should be a fundamental priority for any contact centre; it increases productivity, efficiency and effectiveness, as well as delivering an improved customer experience. However, in our experience, we see time and time again contact centres that are falling into common traps that are easy to avoid with new, cost-effective, cloud-based technology.
Pitfall 1 – The false economy of abandoned calls
When you are busy, it is easy to assume that those callers who can’t get through, or those who abandon their call in a long queue, will call back when you are having a quieter time. In fact, it is estimated that as many as half of the people that abandon their call will call back within the next ten minutes. This is at a point when you are likely to still be just as busy and therefore compounds the problem.
What can you do?
New technology exists that allows you to rescue the abandoned caller and put them back into the queue, where the system does the queuing for them and they get a call-back when they are next to be answered. By combining this new technology with the increasing trend for people to call from their mobile phones, you can also send a text message to the customer at the point they abandon, apologising for not answering and telling them that the system has automatically queued them for a call-back within 3–5 minutes.
Pitfall 2 – Poor routing requires more agents
40% of customers say they get frustrated when they have to be transferred to another agent. This does not impact just the customer experience but also the efficiency of the contact centre; it is estimated that 180 calls that have to be transferred each day equates to an additional full-time agent.
What can you do?
There are a number of ways of reducing the need to transfer calls. Use different telephone numbers to identify why customers are calling, but take care not to have too many numbers as it will confuse the customer. You can also use IVR filters to collect key routing information before the call is even answered. Or use intelligent routing to identify the caller by their phone number, their likely enquiry and map them to the most appropriate agent accordingly.
Pitfall 3 – Ignoring the value of computer telephony integration (CTI)
CTI is used to screen-pop customer information on the agent’s screen, saving valuable time. In contact centres where this functionality is not in use we commonly see significantly longer call durations. For example, a 100-seat contact centre could reduce head count or increase capacity by as much as 5 full-time agents.
What can you do?
Implement CTI to identify your caller at the routing stage. Ensure the customer details pop on the screen as the call is delivered to the agent and ensure, if a transfer is required, that the customer details are passed with the transfer.
Pitfall 4 – Working in silos
Organisations who continue to work in silos miss out on economies of scale. In our experience, centralising branch enquiries or combining multiple customer-facing departments under one virtual contact centre can deliver in the order of 20% savings in capacity/resource.
What can you do?
Cloud contact centre technology enables the true virtualisation of customer service and the centralisation of call management. You are still able to offer a local service but have the ability to manage this centrally and, through efficiencies gained, you can reduce the number of agents required and therefore lower your costs.
Pitfall 5 – Ignoring the customer at your peril
74% of UK adults have stated that they would change a supplier based on a poor experience with the contact centre. It is absolutely essential that contact centres are listening to their customers and doing everything they can to ensure the experience is a positive one. Continually monitoring performance against customer expectations is vital to succeed.
What can you do?
Cloud-based solutions make it easy for you to leverage call recording to capture interactions and turn these into actionable tasks where improvements are required. For a closed-loop process it is important to capture the agent’s and the customer’s feedback to drive improvements in performance and enhance customer experience.
Pitfall 6 – Managing in the dark
The contact centre is a dynamic environment, every day brings new challenges which must be responded to effectively. Time and time again we are seeing contact centres trying to manage their operation with only historical data, and this has a severe impact on customer experience and performance. It is like driving a car only looking in the rear-view mirror.
What can you do?
A cloud-based solution gives the contact centre manager easy access to real-time information. It provides the ability to dynamically change call flows, routing rules and agent allocation to respond to the situation right now, not how it was last week. This is especially useful in times of unforeseen peak call volumes that cannot be planned for.
Written by Jason Roos, Chief Executive Officer, Cirrus
Author: Megan Jones
Published On: 29th Jan 2014 - Last modified: 18th Sep 2019
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