Blending Emails with Phone Calls in Your Call Centre

Fill those inevitable gaps can help boost agent productivity

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Blending Emails with Phone Calls in your Call Centre
Contact CentreInsights

Published: February 5, 2021

Anwesha Roy - UC Today

Anwesha Roy

Looking at agent idle time in a contact centre, it is tempting to try and route available minutes (which cumulatively make up several hours across the day) to productive activity. For example, if the average idle time between two calls is 6 minutes, totalling 120 minutes if the agent handles 20 calls a day, how can you make use of these 2 available hours?

This is where channel blending comes into play. Blending emails with phone calls to fill those inevitable gaps can help boost agent productivity while cementing your multi-channel footprint. But there’s also a downside to this tactic.

Let us discuss the pros and cons of blending emails with phone calls, in more detail.

The Business Case for Blending Emails with Phone Calls

In the last few years, there has been a definite push towards voiceless customer interactions. Gartner reports that 85% of a customer’s relationship with an enterprise will soon take place without interacting with a human being, and the first step towards this is weaning off voice calls.

While voice calls remain the most popular customer service channel (74%), email isn’t too far behind. 62% of customers prefer to contact their favourite brands via email, so it makes sense to invest in your email response times, service quality, and agent availability.

Apart from customer demand, there is also the productivity factor, as we mentioned. As self-service adoption grows, your agents will have increasingly more idle time on their hands. Using these spare minutes to clear to the email queue would maximise agent availability while improving CX.

Blending emails with phone calls also provides agents with hands-on omnichannel training, gradually upskilling them for blended advisor roles, which pay better and are also higher up on the contact centre career trajectory. Finally, it prevents agents from becoming disengaged during seasonal downtimes, when voice calls are at an all-time low.

However, one should also consider possible challenges and pitfalls.

What are the Cons of Blending Emails with Phone Calls in a Contact Centre?

Proponents of single-channel contact centres advocate for specialisation that a blended environment cannot provide. Daniel Ord, founder & director of OmniTouch International went as far as to call it “a misguided attempt to achieve productivity” even though it looks “beautiful on paper.”

The argument against blending channels isn’t without reason:

  • Multi-tasking isn’t recommended during customer interactions, as it could divert agents’ attention from the task at hand. Channel blending could make it difficult for agents to segment their workloads, bringing down CX quality across both channels
  • Your infrastructure may not be up to the task. In a survey on multi-channel engagement, 41% of contact centres said that integration with existing channels/systems is a major challenge. If agents can’t seamlessly switch from call to email, it will lead to further loss of productivity
  • It could add to your scheduling efforts as well as training and recruitment costs

Ultimately, it may only be a matter of time before contact centres start blending emails with phone calls in response to customer demand. But it is advisable to keep the above considerations in mind before doing so.

 

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