Recently, ContactBabel released their U.S. Contact Center Decision-Maker’s Guide, which is an overview of US call centers, touching a wide array of topics. Knowlagent sponsored the performance section of this report, which covers how the various centers were performing over the past year, along with what can be done to improve these results, and keep contact centers operating locally so that they can successfully serve the public for so many companies, without the need to outsource to other, cheaper locations. The results showed various improvement opportunities, along with surprising results.
Knowlagent provides contact center solutions for over 10 million agents, and is one of the major financial backers behind the report. It focused on the performance section, which covers several pages of metrics and analysis. According to Matt McConnell, President and CEO of Knowlagent, the section highlights how contact centers still struggle to find the correct balance between efficiency and effectiveness, usually stuck between a certain budget and a desire to answer all customer concerns promptly.
One of the suggestions that came out of the report is to decrease idle time for agents by adding tasks to their job descriptions, and making them more productive between calls, with things like additional training or coaching, without impacting service levels. The report covers the period of November 2011 to February 2012 and looks at 210 contact centers.
Some of the key findings of the overall reports include the fact that agent talk time has decreased, possibly because of the popularity of email and text based chat, 33 percent of first calls do not get a resolution, leading to second and third levels having to handle those calls, and that short calls do not necessarily correlate with a better customer satisfaction.
It's no surprise that a lot of companies have taken the route of cutting costs in their customer support services by outsourcing, sometimes to other countries, but many still remain in the US, and by improving some of the things highlighted in the report, these contact centers can provide even more benefits to their local business clients, along with helping customers more.
Knowlagent is the company behind one of the most popular call center software solutions, helping to improve agent utilization and increasing activities during idle time. The company creates active wait time through dynamically delivered sessions for common shrinkage activities between customer interactions. Their on-demand solutions are easy to use and require no capital investment to over 300,000 agents around the world.