Keeping Your New Year's Resolutions...For Your Contact Center

Did you make any New Year's resolutions this year? Many people do. Did you make any New Year's resolutions for your contact center?

Perhaps it sounds odd, but it shouldn't. Improving customer service should be the goal of any contact center, and the beginning of the year – after the holiday spike is over – is a great time to do it. TMCnet recently hosted a Webinar entitled, “Keeping Your Contact Center's New Year's Resolutions.” The event, which featured Joseph Katz of Hold-Free Networks, Edwin Margulies of call center outsourcing giant Convergys (News - Alert), and Michael Haisten of Earthlink, was moderated by TMCnet's Stefania Viscusi.

Many personal New Year's resolutions involve losing weight, getting organized and spending less and saving more. Sounds routine, but what if you apply these goals to your contact center?

Lose “wait.”

While you may be concerned about losing a little spare tire around the middle, it turns out...your contact center can benefit from it as well. Are your customers holding too long? You might think not, but according to CNN, the number one consumer complaint on the phone is waiting on hold too long, said Katz. Eliminating wait times via well designed virtual queuing solutions will escalate customer satisfaction, but it can also save money by increasing first-call resolution rates. An ideal virtual queuing solution will be painlessly installed, integrate well with legacy equipment and easy to use.

Get organized

Easy to say, but trickier to accomplish. The most streamlined way to get organized, said Margulies, is by following best practices in automation in the channels your customers prefer (and nowadays, they prefer as many channels as possible). Perhaps it's counter-intuitive – many organizations now believe (erroneously) that customers don't like automation and self-service. This isn't true...customers dislike poor automation and self-service, but rather like it when it's done properly.

But just as the call center is one cohesive whole that services customers via a variety of media, so too does the automation solution need to be. While the service needs to be customized individually via channels – customers expect it – the service these automated channels provide need to be well integrated into the greater contact center operations to avoid the “silo” effect. Traditional ACDs and IVRs won't get you where you need to be, however. Empowering customers requires an integrated solution that is the best a contact center can offer. 

Spend less, save more and sell more.

While the demands of customers have been escalating as to the service they are provided, contact center budgets have not. This is a very “2012” business challenge. Starting by vowing to turn low-cost leads into high-value sales is a great way to begin, said Haisten. Providing agents with the information they need – both about the customer and the services or products on offer – can help agents close sales faster (and therefore at lower cost).

Many older sales processes don't meet this standard: they are top-heavy, unwieldy and inefficient. Solutions that can get the right customer to the right agent at the right time will help cut the “fat” and close the sale, while trimming metrics like average handle time and misdirected calls, and boosting first-call resolution and customer satisfaction.

So while you may still be struggling with your personal New Year's resolutions, make it a goal to keep them, at least as far as your contact center is concerned. Your organization and your customers will thank you.

Want to learn more about the latest in communications and technology? Then be sure to attend ITEXPO East 2012, taking place Jan. 31-Feb. 3 2012, in Miami, FL. ITEXPO (News - Alert) offers an educational program to help corporate decision makers select the right IP-based voice, video, fax and unified communications solutions to improve their operations. It's also where service providers learn how to profitably roll out the services their subscribers are clamoring for – and where resellers can learn about new growth opportunities. For more information on registering for ITEXPO registration, click here.

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