How Effective Are Your Contact Centre Agents?
5 Ways to Increase Operational Efficiency
(1) Increase Contact Rates
One of the biggest challenges facing contact centres today is increasing contact rates whilst making outbound calls. One solution that allows contact centres to achieve this is Dial Sure from Nexbridge Communications. Nexbridge identified, through independent market research, that the number that a contact centre displays as their outbound caller ID (typically an 08 number) was prohibitive to the recipient answering the call. Dial Sure overcomes this issue by displaying a caller ID that is local to the recipient of the call, which significantly increases the chance of the call being answered, and results in an uplift in the contact rate of the contact centre.
(2) Reduce the resolution time on customer queries
Now that Twitter is pushing close to 200 million members, it has become more and more common to see a variety of organisations offering customer support via Twitter. Given that the average duration of a customer service call (according to Benchmark Portal) is 5.97 minutes, the cost of offering telephone support, especially when offered via a freephone number, can be particularly expensive. When you compare this to the cost of using Twitter for support, many issues can be identified and resolved much quicker and at a significantly reduced cost when compared to telephone support. There are obviously some questions that cannot be answered via Twitter due to privacy concerns, however, when used in conjunction with telephone support, Twitter can increase the operational efficiency of your contact centre agents.
(3) TPS Compliant
TPS Compliance on the data that a contact centre uses for outbound calling campaigns is a concerning area of business operations now that the Information Commissioners Office has new powers that allow them to impose fines of up to £500,000. TPS Compliant from Nexbridge Communications takes this concern away from all of your agents by checking the number that is being called against the TPS register automatically and seamlessly, and automatically rejects any numbers that appear on the register.
(4) Effective inbound call handling
Given that a contact centre will have many departments, with many different purposes, it can make a significant difference to automate the handling of your inbound calls via an IVR menu. An IVR menu makes it possible to place a call with the appropriate team / department by presenting the caller with a number of options that they are able to select by pressing specific keys on their telephone. The result is that the customer is almost always put through to an agent that is equipped to deal with the customer query, which minimises the time that your agents are answering calls that they are not able to assist with.
(5) Automation
Not every action has to be performed by one of your agents, so why not automate some of the services that you offer by using inbound call management features? For example, taking payments over the telephone is a slow and cumbersome process that involves an agent taking payment information, and repeating it back to the customer before processing. An automated payment system is able to do this automatically, whilst remaining PCI compliant, without the need of an agent being on the telephone.
Increase your contact rates
- Guaranteed increase in contact rates through CLI Localisation;
- Wholesale call terminationn rates;
- Various access methods;
- Low monthly service charges;
- High quality account management and support;
- Constant monitoring to ensure optimum performance.
