Work From Home – 4 Most Effective Ways To Train Contact Center Agents

Customer expectations for great customer service are rapidly evolving and training agents to align with them brings huge benefits. Ever since the pandemic season rearranged the workplace, many started to Work From Home (WFH) with breathtaking speed. Keeping contact center agents on task and productive — as more and more people WFH– is difficult. It’s true for the work from home agents who are also moms. They
need to babysit their babies while working or taking care of their kid’s needs but it’s not impossible. 

Recent research from Harvard Business Review states that COVID-19 may have shut offices, but the long-term effects might be just as profound, as 74 percent of businesses plan on reducing the number of employees in their office, even after the virus subsides.Your company can’t afford to go unprepared. More companies had to shift their businesses online but not all have the necessary infrastructure in place. 

Most of them go cloud as it offers increased scalability and flexibility in the long run. Let’s explore further how you can train contact center agents while working from home.

1. Identify underlying performance issues

Leaders should analyze an agent’s performance in quality assurance forms to identify any trends. These forms will show whether an agent consistently receives low or failing scores in particular metrics or from call monitoring data for a particular call type. Leadership should also determine if there are multiple issues such as lack of communication skills, problems adhering to processes, accessing customer data, and processing transactions.

2. Review key performance indicators

If management finds that multiple work-from-home agents are failing in the same contact center metrics, it might be time to revisit them. Average Handling Time (AHT) is one of the KPI that businesses may need to address. If AHT is too short, agents may be rushing callers off the phone to meet their goals. Customers will also often end up with unresolved issues and are forced to call again.

If AHT is too long, there will be longer wait times for customers. However, this is not necessarily a bad thing, as it may be due to new or upgraded business products that customers need assistance with, technical difficulties that require more time on the phone, or focus on a first-call resolution.

3. Communicate with agents

Depending on the structure of an organization, either the quality assurance manager or the contact center manager should discuss the performance issues with the agent. Management should begin by making sure that the agent understands the quality evaluation metrics and how calls are scored.

The assessment must be constructive and include recognition of both the agent’s strengths and performance opportunities by involving great collaboration tools and data analytics. Management should then review the action plan with the agent to provide help and support.

4. Provide consistent feedback and reinforcement

The most effective training programs provide continuous and encouraging feedback to motivate contact center agents. When an agent struggles to perform while working from home, it’s a good idea to offer the agent some extra attention. A cloud-based contact center empowers your agents to deliver the best possible customer experience, wherever your customers are and for them to reach you 24/7.

Management should conduct routine evaluations of the agent’s calls and provide timely feedback, and when needed, provide additional targeted coaching sessions that address the agent’s specific needs. 

If you want to create an action plan, look no further than the Work-From-Home cloud solution as it’s more cost-effective, flexible, scalable and encourages a ton of omnichannel strategies for your seamless customer journey now and soon. Contact center managers could even monitor agents performances in real-time and review SLA reports. We worked with prominent global and local CRM partners and hosted contact centers on Google or Alibaba Cloud. Just imagine a cost reduced cloud solution that can be accessed anywhere and anytime plus add value to your business.

Contact us today!

Source: https://searchcustomerexperience.techtarget.com/answer/5-ways-to-improve-call-center-agent-performance

7 Non – Negotiable Features Your Omnichannel Contact Center Software Needs

The way the world did business had a shift in 2020 till now. It increased the need for new technology such as the cloud, chatbots, live chat, to agents training and many more. Most companies failed to match customer expectations and deliver the experiences customers truly desire. With physical shops closing down and businesses forced to shut down, more companies turn to digital channels like chat, self-help knowledge bases and texting for support. 

While waiting for the current situation to end, omnichannel paved its way into the recent trends forcing brands to innovate and now, making a huge impact by delivering smooth customer experiences in various industries from contact centers to logistics, e-commerce and the healthcare industry.

“In a recent study, only 12% of customers felt like brands actually took action to improve their CX and some 82% of consumers are now comfortable using digital channels to solve their problems, at least sometimes.” – CCW

These consumers are seeking out omnichannel services more often and with nearly three-fourths of consumers expecting consistent service across any and every channel, it means your omnichannel software needs to deliver a seamless experience with every interaction. While working with these trends, changing customer demands and new omnichannel expectations, how can you ensure you have the right software that supports your business needs? We’re walking through seven non-negotiable features your omnichannel software needs, so you can deliver for your customers.

7 Non – Negotiable Features Your Omnichannel Contact Center Software Needs

1. A simplified interface.

More than 80% of companies say their agents have to bounce between more than one system to support their customers. Not only that, contact center leaders say the lack of an integrated agent desktop is their leading productivity challenge.

“The top five challenges are all united by a common theme: agent effort.”

Don’t invest in systems that cause more pain for your agents. When you do, productivity, morale and customer satisfaction suffer. Find an omnichannel software that makes life easier for your team. It should connect context from several platforms into one simple interface. The better your agents are equipped, the more empowered they are to solve real problems, without having to escalate every interaction.

2. Obvious ROI.

Bad service experiences drive up your operational costs. Your omnichannel software should make your business function better. It should drive down key metrics associated with the high agent and productivity costs. Streamlining your operations with an intuitive platform will help your agents spend less time on menial tasks and more time problem-solving the tough stuff.

3. In-line coaching and training.

Does your omnichannel software put coaching and training into your daily workflow? Spoiler alert: your life is easier when it does. As a manager, 70% of your agents’ engagement and experience at work falls on your back. Your agents crave feedback and relevant coaching in-the-moment. There’s a solution. Inline training stops your agents from putting bad behaviors on repeat, turning them into bad habits. An omnichannel platform with built-in coaching tools lets you leave feedback on interactions as you review them. Even better, it gives your agents a way to absorb feedback without stepping out of their queue for intensive training sessions.

4. Seamless transitions between channels.

Piecing together dozens of channels isn’t omnichannel. To serve up the customer experience modern customers expect from every brand, your omnichannel software needs to do more than just support multiple channels. It needs to let your customers (and agents) move from one place to another, without ending the interaction and losing tons of context.

5. Quality and performance management.

Helping your agents improve should be core to your omnichannel software. Look to vendor partners who offer crucial coaching and development tools like scorecards, call recordings and transcriptions, individual agent dashboards and performance tiles. A complete quality and performance management toolset empowers your team with actionable data and context for every coaching moment. And, it gives your agents (and supervisors) visibility into daily performance.

6. Platform integrations.

Disjointed systems plunge your contact center’s revenue-earning potential. Nearly two-thirds of contact center leaders struggle to realize the intended ROI from their contact center because they can’t integrate their systems and channels. Combine the power of your omnichannel contact center software with the other systems you use to support your customers. Open integrations give you the freedom and flexibility to build custom solutions that meet your unique business needs, so you can streamline your entire customer journey.

7. Cloud architecture.

Six months ago, our industry looked at work-at-home as an option. Whether it was cost-prohibitive or thought to be too risky, it just wasn’t the norm. Until it was.

“Now, 35% of the customer experience workforce is expected to work from home by 2023. That’s up from a slim 5% just three years ago, according to Gartner.”

Companies quickly realized the pains of on-premises solutions when they had shift agents to work from home. Now that we’ve lived through the panic shift, it’s time to re-evaluate based on your needs, wants and preferences. If you’re seeking out new omnichannel software, investing in cloud architecture is the low-risk option. You’ll get more flexibility in your day-to-day environments and you’ll strategically support your business continuity plan.

Source: https://www.business2community.com/customer-experience/9-non-negotiable-features-your-omnichannel-contact-center-
software-needs-to-meet-soaring-customer-expectations-right-now-023 37939

Cloud For A Connected World

How do you connect with customers? The telco networks that were built on a cloud-based solution can match the increase in demands, reduce operational cost, bring speed and accuracy. Those connections are going to happen on the cloud. But how many of those clouds are as open, responsive, resilient, and smart as the new year that has ushered in?

New partnerships and platforms for this new connected economy can only truly thrive on a cloud that is simultaneously open and secure, stable and agile, automated and customer-driven. They thrived when carriers and their partners can keep their data, without the data being held back by their cloud provider. This scalability and flexibility is what you can truly expect from our WFH Cloud Solutions, meeting your business needs and helping you choose a provider to create more personalized and humanized customer interactions.

Here’s 4 reasons why the cloud can help build a more connected world for telcos and businesses like yours. Let’s dive in further.

4 Reasons Why The Cloud Can Help Build A More Connected World
1. Access anywhere, anytime

Your staff can access the service anywhere, anytime and from any location to complete their tasks. It’s an open cloud that ensures a secure and robust architecture that is built for business, supporting open-source standards and data storage to allow workloads to be deployed wherever telcos need it most: on premises, at their client or in the cloud. It’s an open, hybrid cloud that carriers—and their customers—can count on anytime, anywhere, for anything without sacrifice.

2. Automation unleashes the network

As the world grows more open and connected, the cloud networks on which it relies must be open and connected, too. Openness, trust and control are just a few of the key capabilities a cloud-based, 21st Century network will require. One of the most essential—truly the essence of the next-generation network—is automation. Just consider the massive transformation that happened to networks earlier this year, in a matter of weeks and even days, when the pandemic hit. Business districts shut down and demand absolutely grew at  uncommon times in residential and even remote areas.

3. Automation and virtualization on an open, hybrid cloud can turbocharge existing telco infrastructure.

With the billions of dollars telcos have already invested in network infrastructure, automation and virtualization on an open, hybrid cloud is proving to be among the best ways to gain exponential value from existing hardware. With a single point of control and zero-touch service delivery, automation can help mitigate risks and support compliance in addition to reducing costs.

The best part of it is about moving to a software-based platform architecture that’s infused with automation so you can move services to where they need to be. As these demands only continue to grow, they will need exponential levels of customer service to deal with any issues that might arise.

4. Improved collaboration

Cloud is among the most effective ways of improving team performance, quality of customer service and experiencing improved collaboration. Business owners are always looking for ways to boost individual and team performance. Staff members can easily share data and collaborate via the cloud  to complete projects even from different locations, thus enabling a connected world for their telcos.

Field workers can easily share real time data and updates with those in the office. Cloud eliminates repetitive tasks such as data re-entry. You can improve the level of efficiency, increase productivity, and save costs by shifting your business to the cloud. The best approach is to shift the operations gradually to avoid data losses or manipulation during the shift. Below are some questions to help you focus on the need to adopt cloud for your business.

• Is it essential for your users to have fast and reliable access to data?
• Are you concerned with downtime due to a local disaster?
• Do you have many home-based users who share files with one another or customers?

“If you answered ‘Yes’ to two or more of those questions, you should consider a comprehensive WFH cloud solution.contact us now!

Source: https://www.ibm.com/blogs/industries/ibm-telco-cloud-edge-5g-
enterprise-cloud-future/

New Normal : Work From Home With A Cloud Call Center

Working from home has become a practice within the contact center space that will continue to divide spaces in 2020. Believe it or not, more call centers are facing increasing call volumes and issues. Now, your contact center must have a solid foundation for a work from home cloud solution that works for you and your team to address the technological needs and multi-site operations.

Do you know that 90% of global organizations were using on-premise solutions for their contact centers before Covid-19, with nearly 7 out of 10 customer service agents working from traditional contact centers and less than 10% from home?. Moving forward, they predict that 71% of contact centers will adjust to new working environments such as home offices. Are you ready to make Work From Home (WFH) work for your contact center? Let’s look at some of the benefits of moving to a cloud contact center.1. Empower agents with a modern-day cloud contact center solution

More contact centers are aware of the fact that a cloud contact center will offer flexibility for employees which are greater than an on-premise system. For beginners, the technology is browser-based so the agents can access the system wherever they are. Remote working is more beneficial to the employees as they are equipped with more flexibility over their working hours and home life which in turn delivers increased improvement in customer service as the remote agents strive to demonstrate their ability to work from home.

2. Monitor interaction analytics

With the right technology and cloud platform, you can safely manage calls, monitor interaction analytics and embrace the new working from home wave to discover new ways that enhance your customer experience and save on costs. Remote working in turn allows your contact center to widen the recruitment pool by looking for agents in other geographic locations and are not limited by the area proximity which your contact center resides in.

Managing remote agents in your contact center can be difficult, especially when it comes to measuring customer satisfaction. By keeping agents at home and healthy, you can increase agent’s knowledge, job satisfaction and your recruiting and retention potential. This is where technology can assist. Using analytics and data from end-points such as headsets, managers can measure and track if an agent’s background environment is too loud, if the agent can be heard plus who is talking and the number of calls.

3. Achieve long term cost savings with cloud solutions

Gartner places cost optimization as the top factor for businesses to migrate their operations to the cloud. A cloud contact center is flexible and scalable, presenting a pay-as-you-go model. This allows you to bring in more agents as needed, avoiding costly installation and proactively monitor your contact center in real-time. Moving to a cloud contact center means more flexibility in staffing, supplier management and business continuity arrangements which can amount to long-term cost savings. Cloud contact center technology means organizations are easily set up for remote working.

For multi-site operations, moving to the cloud offers the opportunity to have a single-cross-site management team with call routing and self-service controlled at a single point. This means management costs are reduced and processes held in the cloud will avoid issues which an on-premise call center solution can experience, such as work duplication across sites.

4. Flexible work schedule for your team

Moving to the cloud also means contact center can support a more volume-driven staffing schedule. For example, work from home agents can log on for short shifts when they are needed (based on how busy the contact center is) rather than the full eight hours which agents might normally work. Cloud contact center technology easily allows for the ability to scale agents up or down according to seasons. Right now, companies across the globe are practicing social distancing and keeping employees remote so our communities stay safe.

Lastly, a remote cloud solution means organisations can combine multiple suppliers into fewer, or even a single supplier to manage the contact center infrastructure. This reduces the time being spent on supplier management. On the business end, cloud-based call center software can boost the functionality of the contact center as a whole coupled with improved reliability and accessibility of local service. A cloud-based contact center empowers your employees to deliver the best possible customer experience, wherever your customers are and however they want to get in touch with you.

Ready to go cloud during this pandemic? For a comprehensive remote working solution, contact us now!

Source: https://www.callcentrehelper.com/benefits-cloud-contact-centre-161073.htm

Top 7 Chatbot Benefits Your Business Can’t Afford To Miss

Did you know that 2020 is becoming the year of the chatbot?

Chatbots have grown and improved their features. A chatbot is just like how a real person has a personalized conversation with you. Most businesses have started to utilize them to provide proactive support and supercharge their customer service experience to the next level. They have been on the rise and help explode the popularity of messaging apps, the accelerated development of all kinds of sensors and wearables with the rise of emerging technologies and Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Let’s dive into the top 7 chatbot benefits and how they can contribute to your business.

1) Keeping up with the trends and being present on messaging platforms

Most customers these days prefer to interact with brands via chat as it’s easier and faster to use. Now, businesses have the opportunity to reach more customers via chatbots while staying trendy for their customers. Furthermore, 65% of smartphone users don’t download any new apps in a month. Since users have their core apps such as Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp, they don’t look for new ones! Therefore, integrating your own chatbot into one of the popular platforms that your customers use daily, can be better than building a new app by saving money and time.

2) Improved Customer Service: Extensive Customer Assistance

A recent survey shows that 83% of online shoppers need proactive support during shopping. So, your customers may require help trying to understand which products fit their needs at any time of the day. In fact, shoppers may not find what they’re looking for due to navigation issues.

A) Provide assistance in real-time

In all these situations, chatbots can provide assistance in real-time like a salesperson in a real store. Moreover, chatbots can offer interactive communication where they also ask questions to understand the real issue. What’s more riveting? Along with text and voice, they can present customers rich content with product pages, images, blog entries, tutorial videos based on their responses that can help them through their journey.

B) Always-Available Customer Support

According to research by Gartner, customer service is the most important factor in success. So, whether you are an international or a local business, having good customer service 24/7 has a positive impact on your customer satisfaction. The customer support process can be improved with the help of chatbots. Bots can be programmed to give automated answers to repetitive questions immediately and forward the request to a real person when a more complicated action is needed. This enables human customer service representatives to save time and assist more important cases rather than time-consuming simple tasks. Additionally, with the help of chatbots, organizations can handle more tasks at the same time so that no customer has to wait.

C) Proactive Customer Interaction

In general, companies apply a “Passive Customer Interaction”, which means that they only respond to customers when they are contacted and not initiate the communication. In competitive businesses – especially with a remarkable percentage of millennials as customers, none of the brands have the luxury to act passive anymore. Most organizations do not have enough manpower to initiate a communication with all of their customers constantly, chatbots allow you to start a conversation with each customer, regarding any issue, any time of the day. This will make your customers feel that your brand is one step ahead, like a friend who is available 24/7 and obviously improves your brand awareness.

3) Increased customer engagement

Chatbots can make the engagement more personalized and interactive especially with a great sense of humor! Needless to say, it’s important to keep your customers engaged with your brand. According to research, companies that engage with their customers on social media were able to increase the customer spend by 20% to 40%. A conventional customer service interface usually provides more information than it receives from the users.

However, Chatbots, in contrast, give only a slice of information at a time and can lead the interaction based on the input the user provides at each specific time. Therefore, chatbots don’t bore customers with irrelevant and unnecessary information and keep your customers on your platform longer and keep the content flowing by maintaining the conversation.

4) Monitoring Customer Data and Gaining Insights

As mentioned above, chatbots are great tools to communicate with customers. With the feedback they collect through simple questions, you can make improvements on your services/products and even optimize your website by adjusting low converting pages. For example, if your landing page generates a good amount of organic traffic but doesn’t convert well, your chatbot can reach out to customers visiting this page with a survey to collect more information on why they are leaving the page without purchasing.

Chatbots can be also used to track purchasing patterns and consumer behaviors by monitoring user data. According to Forbes , this helps a company to decide “Which products to market differently, which to market more and which to redevelop for relaunch”. In other words, companies can track the commands and responses given by their users to the chatbot, predict the responses based on consumer language and direct the bot to suggest a different or a more convenient product or service to the users.

5) Better Lead Generation, Qualification and Nurturing

Personalized messaging that assists consumers along the “Buyer’s journey” is possible with the consumer information that chatbots receive. A bot can ask the necessary and related questions, persuade the user and generate a lead for you. Chatbots ensure the flow is in the right direction to get higher conversion rates.

In addition to generating potential customers and notifying the sales teams, a chatbot can also help you to determine the unqualified leads through identified KPIs (budget, relevancy, timeline, resources, etc and prevent you from dealing with time-consuming leads.

6) An easier approach to global markets

Whether you are already an international brand with customers all over the world or a local brand who is ready for global business, chatbots can solve your customer care problems in multiple languages and 24/7, 365 days a year. This allows your business to scale up its operations to new markets without having to worry about multiplying incoming requests to be handled.

7) Cost Savings

First of all, implementing a full functioning chatbot is much cheaper and faster than creating a cross-platform app. Businesses have a variety of options from ready-made software developed by Facebook, Microsoft and other big IT companies to choose. Since chatbots are automated solutions, they allow organizations to handle many customers at once, and simultaneously. By “Hiring” chatbots that complement human agents, you will not only save on employee costs but you will also avoid the problems caused by human errors.

Lastly, because customers can easily access chatbots within seconds and start interaction immediately. As we can witness, chatbots can be a great yet comprehensive tool for employees for relatively basic and repetitive tasks with enormous speed, easy to implement, maintain and use.

Source:
https://www.digitaldoughnut.com/articles/2017/october/top-7-benefits-of-chatbots-for-your-business

The Top 10 Contact Center Metrics You Should Be Monitoring

“Ringing phones, incoming e-mails, never ending social media requests, live chats and non-stop complaints.”

You’ll see a combination of these only in a contact center. Contact centers can get really busy with all the calls, call agents and data that you track on a daily to monthly basis, and they can often leave you feeling lost.

With more KPIs tuning into the contact center world, you’ll find it harder to choose the essential KPIs.

As a contact center manager, you must be the eyes and ears of senior management. Here’s a key take away. 

Let’s dive in to the top 10 contact center metrics you should be monitoring and learn how to make them a central focus of your contact center even during frantic days. The important KPIs will help you stay ahead of your competitors with all the data to assess the performance of your business and how to run it successfully.

1 . SLAs (Service Level Agreement)

The Service Level Agreement KPI measures your ability to deliver the standard of service agreed upon in the Service Level Agreement (SLAs) provided to your customers and your contact center’s promise of maintaining a certain standard of service to your clients, customers  and typically speaking, the SLA will specify that your contact center is committed to answering a set percentage of calls within a certain number of seconds, such as answering 80% of calls within 20 seconds.

It’s important to monitor service level in real time, as it provides an active barometer of your contact center’s current performance. If service level is fluctuating, you need to know about it immediately in order to solve the problem. Service level may be influenced by a range of issues, such as unexpectedly high call volumes, unplanned service outages, or high agent absenteeism.

2 . Call Abandonment Rate

You want to deliver great customer service, but it will never happen if your customers don’t stay on the phone long enough to get assistance. Call abandonment rate measures the percentage of callers who hang up before they even reach an agent. For an instance, the graph above shows the number of abandoned versus active calls.

This metric won’t likely tell you much about an individual agent but it will tell you a lot about contact center agent productivity as a whole. If the average call abandonment rate is too high, look for problems that affect all your agents and see why they aren’t able to get to your customers in time.

3 . Customer Satisfaction Survey

Customer satisfaction survey (CSAT) is a comprehensive way to measure contact center agent productivity. The customer satisfaction survey is the most direct KPI to monitor and to tell if your contact center is providing the support your customers need.

Get a well-rounded look at how happy or unhappy your customers are with your business with customer satisfaction survey (CSAT) questions. Measure customer success, increase retention, and reduce customer churn.

4 . NPS Net Promoter Score

In today’s world, Net Promoter Scores count for a lot. By monitoring your satisfaction levels, you will be able to take measures to improve your NPS scores exponentially. Moreover, it’s possible to measure your NPS scores as a contact center KPI in its own right. By tracking and quantifying your NPS levels regularly, you can gain the ability to evaluate the power of your referrals.

On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend us? That’s the burning question you need to ask your customers. If the score falls between 0-6, your customer is a detractor. If it sits in the region of 7-8, your customer is passive. You are lucky if it lands on 9 or 10; your customer is a definite promoter. Deduce the critics to the promoters, and you get your Net Promoter Score. Like satisfaction levels, NPS scores are a priceless loyalty metric. If measured correctly, they can help you scale and grow your business by using your customer service efforts as a key driving force.

5 . Agent adherence

The Agent Schedule Adherence KPI measures how effectively contact center agents manage their scheduled time for work activities. The metrics used in this KPI will differ depending on the type of contact center or help desk you are operating. A high adherence rate indicates that agents are being cost-effective with their time and providing responsive service to your customers.

Schedule adherence is an important factor in contact center performance, as low adherence rates may result in failure to meet SLAs and deliver a poor quality of service to customers. It’s important that adherence take into account necessary activities such as writing up call reports and necessary breathing time between calls. An adherence rate of 100% is unrealistic and most contact centers strive for around 80% adherence.

6 . Resolution Rate

Resolution Rate KPI can help you gauge how your company performs when it comes to customer experience, as well as show you how well each of your customer support reps perform individually. The metric above helps you track each customer service rep’s ability to resolve customer service requests and compare reps’ output side-by-side.

If you were a manager over this team, you should look into how your contact center agents managed to close all of their tickets, especially if they have done so successfully for several weeks. You could learn some of the resolution techniques they use and share them with the rest of the team to improve their performance. Viewing this data as a stacked bar chart helps you easily compare how many closed and open support tickets each rep has during a specific week.

7 . Call Arrival Pattern

Call Arrival Pattern helps managers identify the peak hours whether they are during the highest calls or lowest calls. With this KPI, managers get to identify when the busiest hour of traffic is and when is the best time for you to prepare and schedule enough call agents to handle the increasing number of calls during a specific time.

This KPI is truly essential for you as it tracks the number of calls coming in daily throughout the whole month and allowing managers to identify the patterns and which time of the day has the highest number or lowest number of calls.

8 . Quality Monitoring

Customer experience drives many business initiatives today because customers have so many choices available for the products and solutions they purchase. That’s why the contact center—the most direct link for customers—must provide the highest level of service and support. Interaction with a live agent is an emotional touch point in the customer journey. Customers take their cues about a business and its performance from the interactions they have with the contact center.

Monitoring the quality of agent interactions is a rich source of data and insight, particularly when combined with post transaction customer sentiment data. It stands to reason, then, that contact center QA should closely monitor its activities and employ the insights gathered to make improvements. Gathering customer experience data, analysing it, training contact center agents and employing new methodologies, all add up to a consistent quality experience.

The metrics applied to contact center quality monitoring can be varied based on the nature of the business and the contact center functions. However, the standard of using a scorecard containing the agreed-upon metrics will help guide the quality process and result in relevant, actionable information.

9 . First Call Resolution (FCR)

First Call Resolution is another KPI you should track to measure the rate of issue resolution in the first conversation. Your customers will appreciate having their issues solved right away and resolving them in a call eventually drives satisfaction. Calculate FCR by taking the number of issues solved in a single call by total number of issues raised per day.

The FCR KPI is one of the clearest ways to measure contact center agent productivity and effectiveness. If a customer has to call back multiple times, is transferred too often, or handed over to a supervisor to get their issues resolved, you need to see how to eliminate this so they can have their issue addressed the first time around. Proper training, setting metrics that aren’t counterintuitive to FCR and agent empowerment are all solutions to keeping a high First Call Resolution.

10 . Occupancy Rate

Occupancy rate is a way to measure contact center agent productivity across all their call-related duties. It’s the measure of how much time your agents are on live calls and finishing up work related to those calls. Simply put, if your agents’ occupancy rates are too low, they aren’t doing something work related. Use this metric to identify duties, events and situations outside the call-related work that need to be addressed.

Running a contact center is no easy feat. Even with the rise of social media, live messaging, and chat bots, people still like to use the phone to ask questions, request support, make purchases, and resolve issues. With so much activity and such little time, keeping tabs on support levels and running efficiency might seem impossible. By tracking the right contact center KPIs and metrics, you will be able to grow, develop, and fortify your contact center on a consistent basis, helping you to gain an all-important edge on the competition.

By using a comprehensive contact center solution with more features and CRM integration, you can manage your contact center more effectively. Measuring contact center KPIs that are associated with customer satisfaction, agent effectiveness and contact center efficiency should be the main objective of any manager seeking to optimize their contact center’s performance and keeping track of the aforementioned KPIs is a great place to start. If you’re currently using contact center software but aren’t able to get the visibility you need in these top metrics, contact us today!