What Do You Really Know About Cost Management?

Mike Hutchison attempts to set the record straight about 5 of the most common myths about cost management.

1. Cost to serve is the call centre’s responsibility

The Truth: There are often problems that manifest in the contact centre but have originated upstream – for example, changes to policies or information that was sent to the customer that was confusing, or unresolved billing issues.

It’s important to quantify the events that take place during interactions to determine where processes in other areas of the business are causing customers to contact your company.

2. Listening to a sample of calls will identify the problems

The Truth: Making an assumption of a problem based on a small sample of calls nearly always yields an inconclusive result. You can almost always find one or two examples to support a theory, but that doesn’t mean it’s indicative of the larger issue.

In order to fully understand what’s driving costs, you need to be able to quantify all of the events occurring across all of your interactions. Only then will you be able to find correlations, trends and calculate impact.

3. All I need to do to save costs is reduce handle times, which is a simple fix

The Truth: It’s true, reducing handle times will save costs. But to know where to begin, you first have to know what’s driving calls, what call types produce long calls, are long calls isolated to certain agent groups, what series of events happen on the calls to drive up handle times, etc.

Interaction analytics delivers the information needed to get to the root cause of the issues driving up handle times.

Without it, you’re left performing random evaluations, or worse, setting blanket goals for handle times that often cause a significant drop in the level of customer service as agents struggle to meet those goals without addressing the cause of long calls.

4. Moving calls to other channels is another simple fix that will save me lots of money

The Truth: Call deflection can be a cost saver, but you have to know what’s driving calls to know how to deflect them.

Only through the identification and quantification of events that take place during calls can you determine if that event could have been better handled via the website, a mobile app, chat.

This also extends to whether those events occur frequently enough to make the cost of setting up and maintaining the deflection channel advantageous.

5. Shifting my contact centre operations to outsourcers is the best course of action

The Truth: Many companies look to outsourcers to save them money. However, few have a solid plan in place for measuring their performance. Most rely on reports delivered by the outsourcers themselves to determine how well they’re meeting goals and adhering to corporate standards.

A deeper investigation often reveals that corners are being cut in order to meet the requirements that companies put forth for metrics like handle times or transfer rates, and all at the expense of customer experience.

Interaction analytics allows companies to measure performance at the site, team and agent level, against the metrics that matter most to them, and to have first-hand insight into how interactions are handled.

With thanks to Mike Hutchison, Vice President of Business Operations and Sales Support at Nexidia