Turning your contact centre into a happy place for your customers, agents, and organisation can be challenging. A poorly managed contact centre damages hard-won customer loyalty and company profits, churns through agents, and increases the effort and expense of maintaining an optimum workforce. The financial and operational fallout can result in a negative profit centre. Instead of value, it’s just paying lip service to the superior customer service you want to provide.
Forbes’ article on ‘8 Call Center Management Best Practices In 2023’ highlights some of the issues resulting from poor practices and what you should do about them. If you’ve read our first and second blogs in this series, you’ll appreciate how the right technology can help support these best practice recommendations.
Empowered and productive employees
We all want to hire the best possible agents – and keep them. And when you have to account for high staff churn and burgeoning recruitment costs, the management-level question is always: Why is it so hard to keep people?
As Forbes points out, the key to agent retention is not only incentivising and rewarding performance, but through training, providing clear demarcation of roles and responsibilities, and enabling great communication between agents and supervisors.
How can the right technology help?
Microsoft Digital Contact Centre provides extensive reporting – so you have all the real-time key performance indicators you need to identify your high performers and subject matter experts. You can also pinpoint where and why specific agents are struggling and provide more training and support as needed – so they’re never left feeling unable and ill-equipped to do their job well. And you’re not distracting your most skilled agents by applying training where not needed.
With single-click collaboration, your agents can work to resolve an open case directly with experts in the company based on skillsets and expertise – aka intelligent case swarming. From an agent's perspective, they feel more confident and empowered. From a management perspective, you know that your first-call resolution rate is looking good, reducing callbacks and poor customer satisfaction rankings.
Likewise, intelligent call routing can direct customers to the right person to manage their particular query rather than overloading a less qualified or experienced agent. Naturally, virtual agents can be enabled to handle more routine, repeatable contact centre tasks – again, reducing the pressure on the call queue.
Given the familiar tools that make up Microsoft Digital Contact Centre (including Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Teams), there’s less time required to train your agents to use the technology – so they’re up and running more quickly. The web browser experience provides tabs so that, during any call, an agent can find all the information they need to improve resolution rates while providing a highly customised interaction. And with a helping hand from proactive AI bots, it’s easier and faster for your agent to find accurate and relevant answers based on the context of the call.
A more knowledgeable experience
The fastest way to resolve any call is to respond to the call or customer reach out as quickly as possible, and provide the right information in the right way. All of this equates to an effective, speedy, cost-effective contact centre experience relished by time-poor or frustrated callers and the holder of the purse strings – your CFO.
Microsoft Digital Contact Centre offers an omnichannel experience so customers can use the contact method that best suits them to seek support or resolution. This includes self-help through an online question-based knowledge library where you host all your ‘how to’ content, and customers can bypass call queues and find their own answers 24/7. As mentioned earlier, AI bots can also proactively provide your agents with knowledge during calls to reduce the amount of time they need to search for answers and effectively speed up issue resolution.
With easier access to knowledge, calls can be resolved more quickly, with fewer escalations. This results in happier customers and better support - without increasing agent numbers.
So, when sharing KPIs, like FCR (first call resolution), CPC (cost per call), customer satisfaction rates (CSAT), and net promotor score (NPS), you’re demonstrating to the management team that agent and supervisor performance is not only constantly improving, but that your contact centre adds significant operational value.
Be prepared
Growth is always a business priority – and with that comes the need to scale up support and service. Microsoft Digital Contact Centre not only supports scaling by automating repeatable tasks as well as more sophisticated transactions. As it is cloud-based, it accommodates seasonal or unexpected surges in demand, intelligently adjusts to changes in call volumes, how many agents you have on hand, and service levels without sacrificing performance.
In summary, best contact centre practice today is largely enabled by technology that proactively supports your agents, customers, and management objectives. So, it’s happiness all round.
