Call Center Efficiency

There are many benefits to optimizing call center efficiency for both companies who use call centers and the customers who call into them.

But what does it mean to be efficient within a call center? There are the obvious industrial aspects of streamlining a process to keep productivity at a maximum and proper allocation of resources to keep costs low. On the customer side, there is a demand for satisfaction with the call center – both with their personal call and how they perceive the company once their interaction is over. In sum, you can run the most technically efficient call center, but lose your customer base if the quality of care isn’t up to par. It is the blend of agent output with customer satisfaction that determines the overall efficiency of a call center.

Since there is a tight relationship between the technical aspects of a call center and the performance of agent interaction with customers, to improve call center efficiency there are many factors to consider on your quest for optimum call center efficiency.

The most glaring items to take into consideration are your call center metrics. These metrics are comprised of things like talk time, handle time and first call resolution (FCR). These numbers directly impact both customer satisfaction, other call center metrics and the company bottom line. For example, if talk and handle times are too long you may have customers who hang up or become angry and dissatisfied with their service. In these instances, this reaction results in a loss of business to the company – a very noticeable inefficiency.

If talk and handle time can be reduced, there is a direct impact on many other metrics such as overall satisfaction, volume of calls that can be taken, morale of call center agents and higher rates of FCR. But how can you impact these metrics?

The first action to consider would be call routing. The more a customer is transferred from agent to agent the longer the call time and the less satisfied the customer is with their experience and the more likely they are to find a company that will better service their needs. By properly routing a customer from the onset, using IVR or similar processes, the easier it will be to resolve their problem, end the call satisfactorily and move onto another, thus keeping the flow of calls moving and allow agents to help more customers.

In turn, handle time is greatly impacted by the internal efficiencies of the call center systems.Things to consider here are proper and appropriate IVR to route calls and wait times for forms or other numbers that regularly need to be looked up on call.By reducing the amount of lag time or wait time within the internal systems, handle times drop significantly and boost productivity.

Outside of the technical, another factor within talk and handle times is how your agents are interacting with customers.This isn’t just their personability, but the way that they guide the call.There are several studies that show scripted or guided practices will also decrease talk time and positively impact efficiencies.

This brings us to the agents themselves.The agents are the ones who most directly impact efficiencies.Things to consider when looking at your agents are how well they know the subjects they are troubleshooting and what you can do to train them and elevate their ability to quickly and efficiently handle calls while also maintaining compliance.If you have agents who are underperforming, ensure that you are providing proper and continued training to create experts. Provide them with the ability to ask the right questions of their peers and supervisors by providing inter-agent chat software and maintaining the proper ratio of agents to supervisors.

Your agents are also a front-line defense for spotting inefficiencies; they are the ones who see the inefficiencies first hand in their day-to-day calls.Soliciting feedback from them and listening when they bring problems forward helps to locate and isolate inefficiencies in the system and steer your teams towards fixing them.

Additionally, utilizing live call monitoring or auditing recorded calls will help you discover where problems lie.They can lead you towards patterns of inefficiency or customer dissatisfaction or tell you if call times are taking too long based on agent performance or on system failures.In all cases call monitoring is a great tool for streamlining your call center.

In broad strokes, call center efficiency boils down to timeliness.If you have a fast acting, expert team of agents within your call center, your customers are helped quickly and leave satisfied. That said, once a successful and efficient rhythm is found, it must then be maintained through continual evaluation of metrics and service.