Email UsCost Reduction Starts On The Shop Floor
By Nick Walker, Infinity CCS
Having worked as an agent in a contact centre and now working within a contact centre software provider, I am somewhat a poacher turned gamekeeper. However, my time on the shop floor has helped me tremendously to understand the day to day issues that many contact centres face and see how the technology can make a significant contribution to improving productivity, reducing costs and improving customer service.
My list of stories is endless, so I will not bore you with all of the tales of woe from my time as a agent, but instead will give you the headlines. I then encourage you to walk the shop floor, listen in to a few calls and watch how your agents work. I can guarantee that within an hour of being at the sharp-end, you will identify ways to make the agents life easier and increase productivity.
The Agent Desktop
As an agent, the quality of service that I could deliver to the customer was directly proportional to the tools I was given to do my job. My desktop application, or should I say applications, presented me with numerous points of pain, the main ones being:
Unified view of the customer ? when an agent receives a call from a customer, they need to be presented with a unified view of the customer; what products and services do they have, when did they last call and about what, have we contacted them recently, etc. All of these things allow the agents to pre-empt why the customer is calling and start the call proactively ? i.e. making the first impression count. Many times as an agent, I had to establish who the customer was and why they were calling before I could bring-up their details and then this view was focused on a single product with either no or irrelevant contact history. Such systems, or a lack of such systems, not only extended the call duration, but in many instances, I felt I was unable to provide the service to the customer that they expected.
System Speed ? we have all experienced the agent apologising for their system running slowly. I can assure you that a three or four second delay in the application presenting you with information seems like three or four minutes when you have a customer at the end of the phone. This issue stems from using systems that were not designed for contact centres. Multiple screens of information and slow response times as you step from one screen to another to get the information you need can, and I have experienced it, add up to 50% on the duration of the call.
Customer Focused ? as a new agent, it took me a long-time to understand my way around the multitude of desktop applications. I needed to manage customer calls and find the best way to structure my interactions to quickly and effectively address the customer enquiry. The issue I faced was that systems were product or service focused, not customer centric or were not structured to support the customer interaction.
Having joined Infinity, I can now fully appreciate the value of a unified agent desktop; a system that allows you to prompt the agent and guide the agent through a logical structure to the interaction as well as one that consolidates information from various legacy systems into a single screen, showing the agent the information they need to process the customer inquiry and to provide this information as and when the agent needs it in a timely fashion.
Outbound Dialling
The time I spent on outbound campaigns was also enlightening. Without any automated dialling, I was required to manually dial potential customers from a paper list. I would use the details on the list to pull up the customer screen before I made the call and mentally prepare myself for the call I was about to make. I would then manually dial the customer only to find, at least three out of four attempts, I would not get through to my target. The whole process was slow. I wasted so much time preparing for a call that just did not happen and it was demoralising sitting there listening to a ring-tone with no answer.
Again, having now had exposure to outbound dialling technologies, I can see the enormous productivity gains that can be achieved. If you just take my experience, I am sure I could have operated three to four times more productively if I was using some form of automated dialling.
Feedback & Coaching
My last point is in connection to feedback and coaching. In one centre that I worked, they utilised paper-based call monitoring forms to evaluate our performance. The supervisor would retrieve a call from the voice recorder and enter feedback onto a paper-based form. I am not quite sure what happened to this form, but I would not see it for days, if not weeks, after the call was performed at which point the feedback was completely irrelevant and meaningless.
Automating your QA processes is the first step to working with your agents to improve performance. Reviewing calls in a timely fashion, being able to discuss the call when it is still fresh in the agent?s head and understanding the root cause why certain things happen. Not only does automating QA dramatically improve the efficiency of the QA process, it does, and I have seen it, improve the effectiveness of your agents.
Shop Floor Challenge
I therefore challenge you; take one hour and walk around your contact centre, talk to agents and listen in to some calls. Watch how your agents use the systems that you provide them and listen to the reaction of your customers to the service that you are providing them. If you want, I will do the same; let me walk the shop floor and then we can compare notes. I am positive that between us, we can identify ways to immediately cut costs by 20%, or improve productivity by 20%, and in many cases both.
For more information on Infinity Contact Manager and how it can help address some of the issues raised by Nick, please visit this page
If you would like to take Nick up on the Shop Floor Challenge, please call Nick on +44 (0)121 450 7830 or This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it