3 Reasons to Enable Multi-Contact Handling in Your Contact Center

Enabling multi-contact handling in your contact center can be a great way to quickly boost your contact center’s service capacity without investing any extra funds, installing extra software, or hiring more agents. This ultimately increases agent efficiency, which can lead to increases in profitability, customer satisfaction, and customer loyalty. Read on to learn more about multi-contact handling and how it can benefit your organization.

What is Multi-Contact Handling?

Multi-Contact Handling (MCH) is a contact center feature that allows users to handle multiple contacts at the same time. Although the nature of voice calls makes it impossible to handle multiple voice calls at the same time, users may handle multiple instant message (IM) or email conversations at the same time, or they may handle one or multiple IMs or emails while on a single voice call.

Limits on how many contacts each user can handle at the same time may be set individually in the contact center’s administration tool. This means that each agent’s capacity will be aligned with their levels of skill and experience. Additionally, even those agents set to handle more contacts can use their contact center toolbar to prevent themselves from receiving any more contacts if they’re dealing with a particularly involved interaction that requires more dedicated focus.

Why Should You Use it?

Multi-contact handling offers multiple benefits. Read on to learn about some of them:

1. Reduce Wait Times – When an agent has MCH enabled, they can respond to one customer while waiting for a response from another customer. This means they can help multiple people in the time it would otherwise take them to complete a single conversation with one person. With this ability comes faster service and shorter wait times for customers, ultimately leading to improved customer satisfaction and loyalty.
2. Keep Agents Engaged – MCH allows agents to take on as many simultaneous interactions as they are comfortable with. This means they don’t have to wait around for responses, feeling bored or underutilized. This keeps them engaged and ensures that they feel like they’re reaching their maximum potential. Similarly, increases in agents’ contact handling capacity give them measurable goals to work towards and clear markers of progress. For example, a new agent may only be able to handle one contact at a time but strive to handle three or four like their more experienced colleagues; they will know they’re making progress when they feel ready to handle two at a time.
3. Save Money – Enabling MCH is one of the simplest and most cost-effective ways to increase your organization’s contact handling capacity. For an organization looking to add capacity to their contact center, most options have costs associated – hiring more agents, investing in artificial intelligence or other efficiency-improving software, etc. Enabling MCH, on the other hand, is a simple change in settings, that involves little more investment than a few extra minutes of training. With this change, organizations can save on hiring and/or software.
   

If you aren’t already using Multi-Contact Handling, now is the time to start. For more tips on improving efficiency, check out 3 Ways to Improve Efficiency in Your Contact Center.