3 Ways to Raise the Contact Center Bar

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. So, raise the bar on your IVR. You’ll be glad you did. And come on, who doesn’t love bars? No, really – who?

1. Use Self-Service 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 call 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 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 if a customer can make an automated payment by phone but then has to call your center to get details on their current balance. In fact, it could really, really hurt. Um, I have to do what?! Excellent self-service offerings should 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 further, integrating the system with existing data sources. Having categorized and removed repetitive calls, 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 retain 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!

3. Ensure your agents are as productive as possible

Check out these two tips 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, so don’t leave it to the agent to ask still more questions and have to look things up in various systems. That takes more time and is frustrating to both the caller and your 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 raise 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 the agent through the call by presenting the right data at the right time. 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! 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! Make “cut and paste” a thing of the past. (I was a master in kindergarten, with mad ninja pasting and paste eating skills, but paste has no place in your center anymore. Let it go!

With these tips, you can save your agents – and your customers – their precious time. Since time is money, this also means that you will cut down costs! Keep these tips in mind when you’re reviewing your center for efficient use of IVR technology.