Happy Halloween! Today encompasses the thrill and adrenaline of running through haunted houses, hearing ghostly stories, kids pacing door to door begging for candy and horror films filling your TV screen. However, for many contact centers this day brings to mind many more frightening memories, such as an unexpected spike in call volume and not enough agents to cover. Don’t let these villains ruin your customer experience! Here are five terrifying contact center issues you should avoid at your organization along with workforce optimization solutions to solve these thrillers.
1. Fear of the Dark (Unable to Monitor Agent Activity)
Are you often left in the dark when it comes to monitoring your agents? When interacting with customers, it’s not always about what you say but how you do it. Monitoring an agent’s desktop allows you to see what’s happening during customer interactions. Utilizing a desktop recording system lets you identify workflow issues, improve your training materials, and monitor and manage email and chat usage while encouraging effective use of agent tools. Being able to see your agent’s screen allows you to follow each step the agent is taking to successfully help your customer. This insight helps you effectively train and educate your agents on best practices to lessen their call time by answering the customer’s questions promptly by solving their issues. Implementing this solution will make your contact center more efficient and in the end, save you money!
Sweet Solution: NICE CXone Desktop Recording
2. Work in a Ghost Town (Not Enough Agents Available)
Don’t let your contact center become a ghost town! Let forecasting help you. Being able to accurately forecast future call volume helps planning and scheduling your agents that much easier. The closer your forecast is to reality, the more efficiently your center can operate. Utilize a workforce management (WFM) solution to help you prepare for long and short term planning in your contact center. For long term planning, you can begin looking towards the future of your company. If you see a consistent growth within your organization, you can determine that the number of calls coming into your contact center will continue to grow. Therefore, you can forecast the need to plan for an increase in new hires. For short term planning, you can create “what if” scenarios to review trends from historical data. With all of this information you can look at long and short term forecasts to determine expected needs for staffing levels so your center doesn’t become a ghost town.
Sweet Solution: NICE CXone Workforce Management
3. Trapped in a Maze (Scheduling Agents is Time Consuming)
Do you often feel trapped in a corn maze or maybe in your center’s case an Excel spreadsheet? Excel spreadsheets are time consuming and not 100% accurate. Scheduling agents doesn’t have to be a daunting task for your managers. An easy-to-use workforce management (WFM) solution will help you solve this problem. Forecasting uses a lot of historical data and in-depth calculations which is hard to produce accurately with spreadsheets. Advanced WFM algorithms analyze historical data to identify and forecast call patterns. You also receive real-time reporting to ensure your organization is effective and determine areas for improvement. Use this tool to get yourself out of that corn maze and put your resources to good use.
Sweet Solution: NICE CXone Workforce Management
4. Fear of the Unknown
Don’t let the fear of the unknown affect your contact center’s effectiveness. Many organizations have hundreds of call recordings pile up within their system but have no way of sifting through them. Some may try to manually listen to each call which can be a daunting and difficult task to track specific issues. Speech analytics makes this process easier. Contact center managers can use the software to filter through recordings to find common topics in customer calls. Applying this solution increases the ability to quickly uncover customer insights and identify at-risk customer issues and complaints, prevent costly high-impact incidents, and address more effective and efficient handling of customer interactions.
Sweet Solution: NICE CXone Speech Analytics
5. Zombie Invasion (Low Employee Engagement)
Have your agents become zombies? Insight by Uptivity, a performance management solution, can help your organization turn your zombies into hardworking customer oriented agents! Using this solution in your contact center puts everything out in the open. Agents understand their goals, and supervisors know who’s not working up to par. Insight helps supervisors identify who needs help, and where, so you can get more out of your one-on-one time with agents. Make your agents accountable for the work they do and create high expectations for the customer service they provide. Remember, a happy agent makes for a happy customer!
Sweet Solution: NICE CXone Performance Management
You’ve been warned of these venomous villains that may haunt your contact center. Take the right steps to prevent these issues from damaging your contact center operations and customer service.
