In recent years, contact centre technologies have made tremendous gains in cutting organisational costs and increasing efficiency. However, in today’s world organisations need to take on a more strategic role. It’s critical for contact centre managers and customer-focused executives to ensure that agent metrics align with business objectives and that cloud technologies are unifying communications tools for more effective data analysis.
Many organisations are aware that their ageing, on-premises call centres are adversely impacting their business. Not only are these systems complex to maintain but also costly to run. Legacy call centre technology inhibits agents, especially as relevant customer information isn’t always to hand or presented in an integrated fashion. The bottom line is that old and outdated systems have an impact on customer retention and profits. But how can cloud contact centre technologies drive better business results?
1 - Tracking Agent Performance
Most contact centres use multiple, disconnected systems to track agent performance. Fewer than a third of organisations typically use an application to integrate this data. Instead, many waste time transferring it into Excel spreadsheets. Improving agent performance tracking can help enterprise employees increase customer satisfaction while helping companies meet overall business goals. Cloud contact centre solutions are well positioned to increase customer service agility and improve agent-customer interactions on the fly.
2 - Aligning Agents with Customers
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Terry Traina[/caption]
Although most contact centres will measure agents against success metrics, it’s also important that they provide operators with opportunities for further training. Perhaps going one step further matching agents with compatible or specific types of customers in order to increase the chance of positive outcomes.
Collecting and analysing agent performance data can lead to outstanding results if it’s done right. One of the most effective things organisations can do is route calls to the agents best suited to handle them. The majority of multi-site centres employ this technique, while most single-site centres continue to use traditional routing processes, directing calls to the next available or least busy agent or using a round-robin system.
Centres using agent performance data to route calls to the best available agent said the process mapped well to their company’s business goals. With cloud contact centres, organisations can choose among many criteria to determine what “best available agent” means to them. Many organisations base these decisions on the kind of skills and training required for the call. Others make choices based on the communication channel, for instance, voice, chat, or email. Still, others use customer account status or customer value.
3 - Getting agents the information they need
To make customers happy and stand the best chance of solving problems on the first call, agents need quick and easy access to company subject matter experts, who are often outside the contact centre. At many centres, agents have no idea where subject matter experts are or when they might be available.
Today’s cutting-edge cloud contact centres incorporate enterprise unified communication tools which allow agents to instantly see the availability of people they need to contact and choose the means of communication that work best for them. These enterprise-grade features help speed up calls and improve problem resolution.