If you work as a contact center manager, you probably have experienced the following scenario: You have several agents out on their scheduled lunches when your website experiences an issue and there is a sudden influx of calls. Your agents that are still logged on are managing the influx to the best of their abilities but you are watching calls getting abandoned and wait times climb. It is stressful for everybody involved and you know this situation could quickly escalate and have serious down-the-line consequences.
Call centers and contact centers are fast-paced environments with a variety of tasks, processes, and team members. However, due to these fast-paced environments, things can also easily fall apart quickly. High call volumes, long queue times, over or understaffing issues, and customer escalations are just a few examples of how a perfectly regular day in a contact center can turn ugly. Call center management is a complex skill to master, but fortunately, with the right tools, strategies, and mindset, the skill becomes more achievable.
If you have ever read any of our other blogs (which we highly recommend) you might notice that we use the terms call center and contact center interchangeably. We do this because we provide software that can benefit both call centers and contact centers but there is actually a difference in business application.
Anyone familiar with call center management knows that keeping a close watch on metrics is a must when running efficient operations. There are dozens of call center Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that can be tracked but ultimately, it comes down to measuring what is most important to your team and business goals.
When you think of common analytics tools, what first springs to mind? Perhaps, Google Analytics? Good guess. It is a super popular tool. In fact, 29 million sites on the internet use Google Analytics. But, Google Analytics is not an analytics tool but actually a reporting tool. Now you may be thinking…. Is there a difference between reporting and analytics? The answer is YES!
In the world of business intelligence, “data” and “analytics” are often terms used when discussing tools your business should or could be using more efficiently. But it gets confusing really quickly when you start looking into how to actually use and analyze data. Things quickly become about programming languages, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. Or you click one too many times and you get into the weeds of advanced statistical analysis and regression models or predictive modeling.
We have all been there. You finally get a few minutes to make the call you have been putting off all week. You dial in and get put on hold. After waiting for what feels like an eternity you give up and hang up the phone, abandoning your call. A company’s call center abandonment rate is one of the most important key metrics to monitor and also one of the simplest to improve with the right modifications to your procedures.
We love the optimism and the hopefulness that beginning a new year brings. Individuals ruminate about self-improvement practices. Businesses try to forecast what is ahead of them and craft strategies to support those forecasts. Being a call center analytics software company, this is our favorite time of year at Brightmetrics™.
Running a contact center is hard – not unlike the challenge that the world’s favorite hero faced when he opted to coach a rag-tag bunch of players in a sport across the ocean he knew nothing about.
Managing performance in your contact center is strenuous, but essential to organizations. And this past year monitoring performance has become even more complicated as teams have shifted to a hybrid or fully remote work environment. Reduced or stricter budgets, as well as limited staff and management, have only added to the mix. However, at the same time, your customers haven’t stopped reaching out to your business.