Here are a few best practices that you can use in your contact center to boost efficiency.

Imagine an organization with unlimited resources. Such an organization could hire as many contact center agents as they needed to ensure that no customers ever had to deal with long wait times or poor service.

While that sounds like a nice idea for both the hypothetical organization and their hypothetical customers, it’s not realistic. All organizations face resource constraints. The best that any organization can do is to optimize the use of the resources they do have.

Fortunately, there are tools and strategies that can be implemented for this purpose. ComputerTalk offers a number of features and integrations that can help organizations optimize their contact center efficiency.

Benefits of Efficiency Improvements

There are many ways that efficiency improvements in the contact center can benefit the organization as a whole. Below are just a few examples:

• Reduce customer wait times – By empowering contact center agents to support more customers in the same amount of time, you ensure that customers aren’t left waiting a long time for service.
• Improve agent experience – Giving agents the tools to be more efficient ensures that they are performing at their best and aren’t falling behind or being overwhelmed by tedious tasks.
• Improve customer satisfaction – When your contact center is performing at its best, with short wait times and quick resolutions, customers notice. Running your contact center efficiently keeps your customer service at its best, in turn improving your customers’ satisfaction levels.
• Increase profitability – Improving your contact center’s efficiency ensures that you’re maximizing the return on your investments. For example, an agent with the right tools for success can resolve more inquiries and produce more satisfied customers than an agent without those resources, eliminating the need to hire additional agents to attain the same service levels. Additionally, happy customers are more likely to make repeat purchases, increasing potential future revenue.

How to Improve Efficiency in Your Contact Center

Now that you understand a few of the key reasons it’s important to optimize your contact center’s efficiency, the next step is to understand how you can accomplish this.

The following tools and strategies can drastically improve an organization’s contact center efficiency, contributing to better service, increased profitability, and more. Read on to find out how you can implement these efficiencies in your organization.

1. Quickly Access and Share Information with a CRM or Ticketing Solution Integration

Integrating your contact center with a CRM or ticketing solution  is one of the best ways to increase efficiency. CRM integrations can provide screen pops to agents with relevant information, such as previous contact history, as soon as a call comes in. This allows agents to spend less time asking identification questions and manually looking up information and spend more time providing the service and attention that callers need.

CRM integrations also allow agents to spend less time in wrap-up state after a call by automatically inserting activity records into your CRM, populating fields with relevant interaction information, and including links to recordings and/or transcripts of the interaction. This saves agents from having to manually update these details, allowing them to move on to the next interaction sooner.

2. Automate Scheduling with a Workforce Management Integration

Integrating a Workforce Management (WFM) tool with your contact center enables supervisors to automatically forecast demand based on historical reporting and build schedules to accommodate agents’ individual needs. This saves managers time on administrative tasks and allows them to dedicate more of their time to customer service tasks.

3. Handle More Customers Simultaneously with Multi-Contact Handling

Adding channels like IM and email provides more flexibility in how service is delivered. These digital channels also enable multi-contact handling. With multi-contact handling enabled, agents can handle multiple IMs, emails, SMS, or social media messages at once, allowing more customers to be served in the same amount of time.

4. Automate Quality Assurance and Sentiment Analysis with Speech Analytics

ComputerTalk offers tools and integrations that provide speech analytics. These speech analytics automate quality assurance and sentiment analysis, providing valuable insights without needing agent to take the time to manually listen to call recordings and fill out score cards. These insights can help you easily identify areas for improvement, gauge customer satisfaction, and more.

5. Leverage AI for Interaction Summaries and More

Save agents time on wrap-up by using artificial intelligence (AI) for tasks like summarizing calls or identifying reasons for calling. Automating these tasks with AI allows agents to move on to their next interaction quickly, helping the next customer rather than spending time typing up notes or performing other wrap-up activities.

6. Increase First Call Resolution with Skills-Based Routing

Implementing skills-based routing ensures that incoming interactions are routed to the agent best qualified to handle them. This means that agents’ time isn’t wasted on calls that they don’t have the skills to handle, and customers’ time isn’t wasted being transferred and repeating themselves to multiple different agents.

7. Reach Large Audiences Simultaneously with Automated Alerts

From sending out service updates to alerting customers to upcoming promotions, there are many reasons you may want to reach a large number of your customers at the same time. Using automated outbound notifications allows you to instantly reach large numbers of customers at once, via phone, email, or SMS, without taking the time to manually reach out to each of them individually. This saves a significant amount of time and allows you to use your agents more effectively.

Conclusion

In a world where every organization faces resource constraints, it’s important to make the best use of the resources you have. Fortunately, ComputerTalk can help you with that. Contact us for a demo or check out 6 best practices for using customer engagement solutions to learn more ways you can improve your contact center performance.