7 Ways to Improve Contact Center Productivity in 2021

Call reporting will be an essential practice in the future, as it will help call centers evaluate productivity per call, discovering the customer experience (CX) of each user in each interaction, adherence and compliance with the security protocol. Additionally, it will also check if the legal and regulatory needs of certain departments and verticals are being met.

While technological change in the realm of customer experience is ongoing, it is possible to improve the productivity of a call center with relative ease. How?

7 Ways to Improve Contact Center Productivity in 2021

1) Incentivize Agent Performance

In call centers, agent performance can be improved by making their work more entertaining. Gamification is a great way to make the agent training and development process more engaging and fun. Awarding points for satisfied customer calls and first contact resolutions can also improve agent performance. If that cannot be offered, it is wise to ensure that all agents are recognized for their performance. A happy agent will be more productive.

2) Make Self-Service Available to Customers

Clients are divided into two types. Half are comfortable speaking with a customer service representative, while the other half like quick service without speaking or interacting with any agent. The concept and usefulness of self-service is important for customers who do not like to call on the phone and prefer to resolve their queries through other channels. In fact, self-service is used to improve contact center productivity metrics.

Gartner predicts that by 2025 a customer will manage 85% of the relationship with a company without interacting with a human being. Many organizations have found that most of their call center work involves requests for basic customer data. In this case, instead of spending time trying to connect with an agent, customers now use chat, chatbots, SMS, emails, and IVR. Thus, various studies have shown that these new channels dramatically improve contact center productivity.

3) Reduce the “Pressure” of Agents through Data Analysis

If you want to improve the productivity metrics of the agents and the call center, the best way to do it is to analyze the content of the calls to know what types of calls the contact center receives. Based on that, calls can be diverted to an IVR, bot, or agent. This will reduce the flow of calls to agents, allowing them to handle more complex calls.

Additionally, QA tools help analyze various interactions across channels and provide relevant feedback to agents on compliance, call resolutions, and customer satisfaction. These comments can be shared with the agents, as well as with the training department to implement the necessary actions.

4) Integrate Channels

The integration of all service channels is another way in which an important factor called first call resolution (FCR) can be achieved, which occurs when the customer obtains the resolution of their query in the first contact with the call center. To achieve FCR, all possible service channels and resources must be left open to the customer as well as to the service agents. Key metrics involved in first call resolutions include the effectiveness of customer support tools, agent efficiency, and the type of customer experience delivered.

5) Increase the Presence of Expert Agents

Some scenarios require some knowledge and familiarity between the client and the agent. For example, an angry customer may not want to talk to a new agent every time he calls. By routing a particular customer’s call and inquiry to the same service agent repeatedly, a business can ensure improved customer satisfaction and experience, as well as optimize the agent’s understanding of the customer’s problem, leading to a faster resolution.

6) Train Members of a Call Center Team

Staff training is very important and especially in a contact center. This is because skill enhancement is essential to improve agent productivity. For example, training regarding new software and / or technology that are being implemented in a call center is crucial to improve metrics. And because contact center employees don’t always have extra time to train, their training can be delivered online through e-learning.

7) Offer Quick Answers

Customers show their discontent at the long waiting time on the phone and express further irritation when agents put them on hold to seek answers. Therefore, call centers must ensure that agents have readily available responses and that waiting time in queue is less.

Today, some call centers use systems in which agents can search for an answer while the customer is talking. This reduces the duration of the call, the customer wait time and allows the agent to take more calls.

For longer queues, a contact center can adopt the callback mechanism. In a callback system, after a call connects, the IVR can announce what the approximate wait time is and can take input from the caller if they want a callback. The point to keep in mind here is that it is bad practice to keep customers waiting, seriously affecting the customer experience and the brand.

In summary, these are the top 7 tips for a call center to be more productive. While technology transformations take time to implement, the human elements of customer service delivery can be strengthened to deliver an exemplary customer experience.