A functioning and highly profitable contact center doesn’t have to be a daydream. All you need to do is learn how to leverage your contact center technology. This means tracking your revenue, monitoring agent performance, and learning to forecast costs while also staying on top of customer experience and feedback for possible solutions and improvement implementations. It’s a tough cookie to crack.
But as we mentioned before, it’s not impossible. All you need is the right plan. Today, we’re going to discuss 7 different ways in which you can learn how to leverage your contact center technology to your advantage.
Be Aware Of Your Digital Channels
In this day and age, you simply can’t be missing from anywhere. Your customers expect to be able to reach you from any channel at any given moment. Be it phone, email, live chat, or even your social media, expect to be contacted by anyone. And we know this makes it even more challenging because how are your agents expected to keep track of an Instagram message or a Twitter update? To leverage your contact center technology, make sure you are paying attention to all your digital channels. And if this seems too big of a challenge, we’re here to help! At iCall Services, we target each digital channel your business may need with customizable solutions that will keep your customers happy and coming back.
Focus On Customer Engagement
“Once internal and external operations are established and running smoothly, contact centers can work on the final piece of the equation – optimizing customer engagement.”
- McKay Bird, IMCI
What is the best way to connect with your customers? By understanding what they need. When you understand your customers’ behavior, you can act on that and find the best solutions for them. Focusing on building a long-term relationship with them, keeping them happy with timely answers and solutions to their problems, and making sure you stay on top of their mind with customized messages and personalized responses. That’s how customers stay happy and engaged with your brand. At iCall Services, your clients become our very own thanks to our customized approach. This means our agents will become your brand ambassadors with every call, email, or instant message they answer.
Stay On Top Of Reporting
What your agents are up to, the type of queries or complaints coming in, how long it’s taking agents to find a solution and close a ticket, the customer satisfaction and experience after a solution takes place, the overall revenue, etc. Being aware of all this will ensure that you know exactly what’s going on and can measure, analyze and control the overall performance for future improvements.
Manage Your Performance
It’s all about consistency and control. If you manage to keep tabs on your overall performance, you can work to always meet and even surpass your expectations. At iCall Services, we focus on delivering results based solely on your defined KPIs, keeping the work where your business needs it the most.
Identify Your Insights
According to Dave Anderson, EVP of TTEC Digital, the first thing you need to do is learn to identify your insights. This is extremely important because most “organizations don’t even realize they are sitting on a goldmine of insights within their call/contact center.” One of the best ways to do this is to create insight groups, which can include customers, employees, and partners. Anyone has a say here because it all comes down to results, processes, customer experience, and overall feedback.
“Garnering in-depth insight into your contact center data is critical for improving productivity, streamlining operations, and driving revenue. However, the process of compiling, centralizing, and analyzing data to make informed decisions can often be overwhelming and time-consuming for contact center managers.”
- McKay Bird, IMCI
Find a way to make your teams’ insights become automated and you’ve struck gold. This way you’ll earn all the data you need in the blink of an eye and can move on to the optimization process.
Structure & Organize
Make sure your company has both the structure and organization necessary to make something out of these insights. If you are just gathering information with no way to implement or install it, then you’ll just end up with a whole bunch of data you can do nothing about. For example, if you discover that you have an increase in customer service tickets during your busiest season but that your current agents can’t handle all the work, you may need to install a flexible solution that allows you to scale the number of agents during this period.
Take Action
Find out which areas of the business you want to apply those insights to, and start generating some KPIs. Once you decide what your KPIs are, you can start managing them for both performance and expectations.
At iCall Services, we work on managing your company’s KPIs. This means that we run an effective program that runs at your expected performance levels and that also provides insights that can help you identify areas of opportunity & weakness points that you can address in a timely manner. A couple of the most important KPIs are:
- Number of Contacts Offered
- Number of Contacts Handled
- Percent to Forecast
- Average Handle Time
- Average Hold Time
- Average Wrap Time
- Service Level
- Agent Utilization
- Abandon Rate
- Quality
As your outsourcing partner, iCall Services can help you correlate KPI reports to actionable information that can be used throughout your organization. For example, calls handled, agent utilization, hold time, and abandon rates offer insights into staffing, expenses, and cost-saving opportunities. Other customer service metrics may provide insight into how service levels are affecting the customer experience and your reputation.
As you can see, an outsourcing partner can help you leverage your contact center technology. We can help you find new areas of improvement for your organization, keep your customers both happy and loyal to your brand, and keep your KPIs in check. Learn more about our customized approach or request a quote today.