Living through the recent pandemic has been hard on us all. Many of us had to quickly pivot the way we were doing business and develop what is now, our new, more flexible, business-as-usual. While we all continue to adapt, one thing remains constant – our want, or rather, need for immediate gratification.
Technology has empowered today’s consumers to demand more from the companies they do business with. Immediate responses are rapidly becoming the norm and it’s important for organizations to keep up with the customers’ expectations, or risk losing their business. With many contact centers still operating with remote agents, accessing real time metrics on operations and team performance are now more important than ever.
So, what can you do to exceed your customers’ expectations and improve their overall experience?
1. Make Sure You’re Seeing Your Contact Center Metrics in Real Time
What are your average queue times? What customers are calling in? Which agents are busy handling calls, and which are sitting idle? Having the right dashboards and reports that show your contact center metrics in real time is taking your customers’ experience to the next level. These real time metrics allow you to monitor and react before your customer experience starts to take a hit – as opposed to finding out when a report runs at the top of the hour.
Brightmetrics REAL TIME Analytics™ is designed to provide analytics that shows the customer experience as it happens. REAL TIME Analytics is ideal for contact center managers who are in the trenches and want the opportunity to change the way their agents work to meet customer needs.
Some REAL TIME metrics to consider:
- Customers in Queue, longest and average Queue Times
- Agent Routing & Presence Status, Time in Current Status
- Agent Daily Timeline (comprehensive real time day summary)
2. Understand Your Agent Performance
Have an agent who was a top performer in the office, but is now struggling to meet your contact center goals? Another thing we learned this past year is that working from home is not for everyone. How are your contact center managers and team leaders able to maintain transparency and keep a pulse on agent performance with a distributed contact center? It probably goes without being said, but agent performance and job satisfaction have a direct correlation to your customers’ experience. One of the best ways to ensure happy customers is to have happy agents.
“Clear and quantifiable agent performance standards also have a positive impact on job satisfaction.” – Jeff Rumberg, Metric Net
While agent performance metrics will be unique to your organization, we made some recommendations on where to start. Read more here.
3. Have a Data-Based Plan to Ensure Success
“A goal without a plan is just a wish” – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
Like most businesses, contact centers have been adjusting to their new normal during this pandemic. It is quite possible, if not even extremely likely, that the way you used to do things just doesn’t work anymore. Maybe pre-pandemic your contact centers’ busiest hours were Fridays, between noon and 2:00 p.m. – is that still the case? Making sure you have enough agents to meet your customers’ expectations is crucial to customer satisfaction. But, flip the coin and having too many agents and not enough call volume leads to inefficient contact center operations. It’s a fine line to walk – what data are you using to make informed operational decisions?
Brightmetrics Staff Forecasting can use your historical data (with a granularity of 60 minutes) to determine your projected call load and average handle time to help recommend how many team members you’d want to staff. Our Staffing Level Forecast Report feature can improve your efficiency and the probability of delivering the service level targets you set for average queue/wait time per call.
Are you ready to start exceeding your customers’ expectations in 2021? Get started by exploring our new, free forever, solution for Genesys Cloud below.
