(By Michelle O’Brien, with Ideas from Tony Norman)
1. Automate to offload as many routine calls as possible
If you’re not looking at the types of calls coming into your center, you should be. Using ‘Reason’ or other classifying codes will help tell you why people are calling your center and your company. When you can identify the calls types, drill down even further to determine those that are mundane, repetitive. These types of nominees are the best candidates for automation. But be aware that in order to extract real, tangible savings, your self-service solution must support the transaction from start to finish. It won’t do you or your center much good (in fact, it could really, really hurt) if a customer can make an automated payment by phone, but then has to call your center to get details on their current balance. Um, I have to do what?! Good self-service offerings should be able to perform all the tasks and actions that an agent would. There must be rock solid, real-time integration with appropriate front- and back-office systems to ensure seamless transactions are the norm. When your customers can truly “help themselves”, you’ve laid the path for a memorable customer experience both in and out of your center.

2. Route callers properly, the first time, using “Intelligent” IVR
IVR or Interactive Voice Response is the use of touch-tone or speech recognition to secure information and details from callers. “Intelligent” IVR takes those abilities one step farther, integrating the system with existing data sources. Having categorized and removed repetitive calls (see Tip #1, it’s equally as good as Tip #2 & 3), you can then deal with the more routine parts of the calls that remain. More often than not, this involves verification and identification. If you automate verification and identification of the caller and it saves, let’s just say, one minute per call. Then for every 336 calls, you save an entire full-time equivalent (FTE)! Mind blown yet?! Hang with me. Use the specific information gathered to get the caller to the right agent, with the right skill, the first time. Now that’s good customer service. KA-BOOM! (That’s the sound of minds being blown across the nation).

3. Ensure your agents are as productive as possible
Check out the two ideas, below, to help make your agents more efficient:
1. When presenting calls to your agents, provide them with as much information as possible. Once you’ve identified the caller with your “intelligent” IVR, tap into it to mine your data sources; your CRM, accounts system and your order tracking. Because your IVR has done its job, you already know the reason for the call (Again, Tip#1 – outstanding!). So don’t leave it to the agent to ask still more questions and look things up in various systems, taking further time and frustrating both the caller and agent. Been there, done that. It’s no Bueno, not to mention it does nothing good for your customer retention numbers. Save that time and you can improve productivity and elevate both customer and employee satisfaction.

2. Be sure all relevant data is available and easily accessed on agents’ desktops. Use a data tool that provides your agent with a single, whole view of the data. Lead agents through the call by presenting the right data at the right time. Too often we, at VITEC, see agents with more than one monitor because of the number of applications they must have open at all times. De-clutter! Please, for the love of Pete, do away with the disorder. Make “cut and paste” a thing of the past (while many of us were masters in kindergarten, with mad ninja pasting and paste eating skills, it has no place in your center any more). Let it go. Also, make certain single-view applications can write back to all or most data sources. It has to be a two-way process to be effective.

These three tips will help make your agents’ jobs less stressful, improve staff retention, decrease training time, elevate the customer experience and help bolster customer retention. Not too shabby at all! So, raise the bar on your IVR. You’ll be glad you did. And come on, who doesn’t love bars? No, really – who? Chocolate bars, Rice Krispie bars, lemon bars…that’s not what were YOU thinking at all, was it?!