Contact centers provide essential customer service, and efficiency is key to running a successful one. Whether addressing upset customers’ concerns or appealing to potential customers, being able to quickly respond to customers is essential. The role of contact center software is to streamline operations for a more efficient center. Here are some common ways that software benefits customer service teams.
Reduce Average Handle Time
The average handle time (AHT) of your contact center is the average duration of a single customer call, including hold time, transfers, and after call work. Decreasing this time allows employees to move onto the next call more quickly, improving efficiency and often the customer experience as well. The customer appreciates their shorter hold time and not having to be on the phone/in chat for as long — you’re taking up less of their time.
Did you know? The average American will spend 43 days on hold in their lifetime (Source: Marketwatch).
Contact center software like Intelligent Automation helps reduce AHT in multiple ways:
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- Remind agents to return to call handling if a customer is on hold for too long
- Prompt agents to finish their after call work (ACW) when they pass a predetermined threshold
- Monitor agent performance metrics for potential coaching
Agents receive scorecards based on their call handling time. Can you expect agents to give all of their attention to the customer if they’re constantly watching the clock? Intelligent automation provides a better agent experience as well as a better customer experience.
Monitor Customer Hold Times
Your contact center’s customer hold time (CHT) indicates how long customers must wait for their issue to be resolved. Placing customers on hold impacts your centers’ internal operations, because it impacts agent availability. Hold times make calls less efficient for customers. This leads to less satisfied customers in the best scenario, and downright angry customers in worse situations.
Contact center software is able to monitor CHTs at large and by employee. The data makes it possible to identify agents who have longer than average hold times, and help them improve. Coaching and ongoing monitoring can lead to significant improvement in this area.
Quicken After Call Work
After call work (ACW) is a necessary evil. Agents have to log contact details after completing customer interactions, but documenting takes time –time that agents aren’t spending with customers.
Contact center software doesn’t eliminate ACW, but it can quicken the process in two ways. First, software can assist in actually completing some of the work. Anything that can be automated will likely be completed faster by software. Second, software can monitor agents’ ACW times to see if anyone is taking longer than a predefined threshold. Intelligent automation can ask agents if they need assistance if this is the case. If yes, supervisors can be alerted that they need to discuss an issue or help resolve a problem.
Monitor Agents’ States
Supervisors cannot keep up with every piece of data generated in contact center and this includes agent state. Throughout agents’ shifts, contact center software always knows what the agent is doing. This information allows the software to direct contacts toward agents who can talk/chat with the customer soonest. It also helps supervisors identify and bottlenecks in agents’ workflows and specific outlier behavior that may impact agent availability.
Run a More Efficient Center with Contact Center Software
If your contact center has inefficiencies in handle times, hold times and/or after call times, contact us at Intradiem. Each day, our software provides efficiency, agent engagement, and customer experience benefits to over 260,000 users worldwide.