Tuesday, February 24, 2015

How to Drive Contact Center Performance

For many companies, great customer service can be a costly and exhausting endeavor. However, if you improve the way your customers interact with your contact center, you can reduce a lot of issues. A primary objective of a contact center should be to build the type of employee engagement that will result in enhanced customer loyalty and satisfaction, as well as improve the impact on the bottom-line of their business.

Optimize agent performance

The best way to enhance customer satisfaction and contact center performance is by optimizing agent performance. Companies should find ways to reduce average handle time and call volumes while increasing first call resolution. Companies must ensure that their agents fully understand the use of various channel options such as chat, calls and email, and that all these channel options are properly optimized for customer interactions.

Encourage creativity in the agent
Many professionals in the contact center are attracted to the nature of their occupation, which is customer interaction. However, companies restrain them from engaging with customers emotionally, and instead force them to follow strict scripts. By allowing contact center agents some creative liberty companies can improve their performance as this will let them create emotional attachment to the task, which will ensure that each interaction with customer will become a personal interaction, rather than a generic corporate experience.
Prepare business cases for change

Companies must prepare business cases that include illustrations of various problems with compelling facts. Also, these cases should clearly state the parameters of ideal performance and how to achieve them. Measures and metrics that align operations to a department, a team, or an executive must be clearly provided as it’s vital to achieving key performance objectives.
Increase awareness among agents
It is vital that contact center agents must always be motivated as it will allow them to accept new day-to-day work challenges. A monotonous work environment can be highly regressive for a contact center agent. Companies should encourage agents to make contributions to their work processes, and continually teach them new skills and abilities. This way, agents will never feel that their skill sets are diminishing, and this will not only reduce employee attrition rate, but will also enhance their performance.
In many organizations, the drive for efficiency is often seen to be at the expense of the customer. However, a knowledgeable employee  who has been with the company for some time and has the ability to deal with multiple queries on one call will offer the customer a one-stop shop approach to their query. Organizations who spend the time and energy to include the above mentioned principles of contact center management find that their employees are better capable at delivering consistent positive, quality, branded customer experiences that build better customer relationships.

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