Maximize Your Contact Center
In many organizations, the front line for service and support is the contact center. In the typical contact center, a customer calls to report an issue and either gets it resolved while on the phone, or has a technician dispatched. However, with the average cost to dispatch a technician at $230, many organizations are working towards maximizing their contact center’s ability to resolve issues.
According to the recent Aberdeen Group report, Industry Best Practices in Service Contact Centers and Support Desks, 85 percent of polled companies felt that resolving customer issues in the call center is “very” or “extremely” important. However, only 14 percent of these companies were satisfied with their company’s ability to achieve this goal.
Technology Investment
According to Aberdeen, one of the first steps in making your contact center more productive and able to resolve customer issues is investing in technology. Tools such as knowledge management, Web self-service, online chat, IVR and automatic call distribution can help your contact center solve issues more easily and quickly, without dispatching a technician.
A knowledge management (KM) solution can help your contact center employees walk through typical problems by going through a question/answer scenario. The KM solution gathers data from each question and narrows down the answers to eventually display the correct one.
Another benefit of KM solutions is the ability of users to save issue resolutions within the system and make them available to all users. This can help your entire organization share the knowledge of one person and enables you to retain that knowledge when employee turnover occurs. Read our previous coverage of KM here.
Web self-service is another tool to maximize contact centers, making them more productive and improving their first-time resolution rates. Many times you’ll have the ability to extend a KM solution to the Web. This would allow customers to go through the same question/answer scenario via the Web that they would go through with a contact center employee. The benefit is that the customer is solving their problem without involving a rep or having a field technician dispatched.
Focus, Training and Follow Up
Beyond technology solutions, Aberdeen recommends that you focus your contact center’s efforts on service, provide adequate training to employees and follow up with customers to ensure satisfaction.
Instead of giving your contact center other duties such as sales or marketing activities, keep them focused on providing service to your customers. This will make service their primary responsibility, allowing them to better focus on their job duties and goals.
Training is another must for a maximized contact center. You’ll want to train your contact center employees not only on your company, but on the companies that you service and the unique issues they might have. In addition, don’t forget to train employees on both legacy and new products. Employees with adequate training and skills will result in more satisfied customers and more first-time resolutions in the contact center.
Lastly, following up with customers after their issue resolution will help you better understand your customers and the type of service they expect. You should put a formalized process in place to survey customers after an issue resolution and take care of any dissatisfaction that remains.
According to Aberdeen, best-in-class companies who utilized these techniques completely resolved 63 percent of calls in the call center versus the average 52 percent. When the average cost to dispatch a technician is at $230, improvements such as this can lead to substantial savings for your service organization.