Today’s contact centers are under a lot of pressure. They are dealing with higher customer expectations and evolving technology and are forced to transform during budget cuts and financial turmoil. It’s not an easy time for the CX world.
To overcome the challenges of rising inflation, business leaders are searching for ways to “do more with less”. According to McKinsey, optimizing business operations and minimizing inefficiencies may be the key to staying one step ahead in this landscape.
In other words, instead of looking for ways to reduce investment in customer service solutions, companies should search for opportunities to expand their existing resources.
Creating a more efficient contact center not only reduces operational costs but can also lead to better customer experiences, higher levels of retention, and reduced burnout among staff members. The question is, how do companies create a more efficient contact center?
1. Monitor Metrics Connected to Efficiency
The first step in any business transformation is setting the right goals. The only way for companies to ensure their strategies have a measurable impact on their efficiency levels is to determine how efficiency can be monitored and tracked in the contact center.
Implementing analytical and reporting tools which provide insights into valuable metrics can help to accelerate companies towards their goals. For instance, monitoring “Average Handling Time” or AHT can help organizations to determine whether employees are taking too long to manage customer queries and where exactly they’re facing bottlenecks. Agents will likely spend longer searching for information if a contact center system can’t connect other tools like CRMs and service desks.
Tracking First Call Resolution (FCR) rates can be helpful too. The metric provides insight into how effectively agents can resolve issues when they’re presented to them by customers. If an agent doesn’t have the proper training or tools to handle a call or calls aren’t routed to agents based on their skill level and knowledge, FCR rates can begin to drop.
2. Streamline the Omnichannel Contact Center
Many contact center agents need help maintaining efficiency in the modern landscape because they need to monitor various conversations and queries from different channels. Indeed, 74 percent of customers are using three or more channels to communicate with businesses.
While serving customers on their preferred channels can help to improve satisfaction scores, it can also lead to complexity and confusion for team members.
Companies can’t just implement various disconnected tools to serve clients across different channels; they need to produce an all-in-one ecosystem where agents can monitor every conversation in one place. The right contact center technology will empower agents to deliver more streamlined and personalized services, regardless of where they interact with customers.
An omnichannel contact center will also allow agents to move customer conversations across various channels with a few clicks of a mouse. Doing so, can help agents solve tricky queries quickly.
Leaders should also have similar capabilities to shift contacts between channels – before the agent conversation – to best meet demand. Yet, this comes with a warning.
“It should not just be about voice deflection to digital, it’s about using all channels together for the right job,” says Ben Booth, CEO of MaxContact.