Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Hidden time thieves in your call center

Is it the complex telephony infrastructure?
Are your IVR menus too complicated? Too many levels?
Is the skill based routing off? Hunt groups are setup wrong?

Possibly,  but these issues jump off the page and if your call center was having this type of issue, the KPI’s wouldn’t lie. The single biggest expense in any customer-focused call center is labor. Self-service may have exploded in the last decade,  but humans are still the foundation to customer satisfaction.

So where have the humans and the technology not found that perfect synergy in your call center? Based on our observations after working with dozens of call centers over the years, it is what happens after the call not during the call.  In most call center deployments, the high–stress, high-visibility issues are what occur when the customer is on the phone, and every second counts.  These are the first items to get addressed and everything else gets shuffled because it’s not happening right in front of the customer. If you want to find time (minutes – and lots of them -  in your call center, evaluate what is happening after the call.  During those expensive minutes that elapse between when the CSR ends the conversation with one customer and before they are available to provide excellent customer care to the next.  The amount of recoverable capacity will surprise you.