Dispositions – agents hate them, managers love them, but it’s the rare contact center professional who actually uses them intelligently. For too many contact centers, dispositions are just another check box, and another report to glance at on your weekly staff meeting. However, the contact center manager who does a good job of not only ensuring quality, accurate dispositioning from their agents, but also USES that information as feedback, is going to ultimately end up providing a better customer experience.
The first challenge is to entice agents to take the time to disposition their calls correctly. Making dispositions mandatory can help, but that can also drive agents to simply disposition the calls as “general” to quickly get past the requirement of providing a disposition. A better way to ensure that agents are dispositioning correctly is to engage the QA team. Matching QA’d calls with the dispositions the agent selected allows a contact center to create metrics on disposition accuracy. You can take it a step further and run a contest for the agent who has the most accurate dispositioning – when I was an agent, there was no surer way to entice me to do something well than to offer a contest with a small prize.
Once you feel that your dispositioning is accurate enough, the next challenge that many contact centers miss out on is using that information to CHANGE their customer experience. Consider looking at your disposition reporting and seeing that many of your calls are for a specific task – let’s say resetting a password. An okay contact center will take this information and maybe mention it to their agents. A great contact center will revamp their IVR to include a self-service option that resets the customer's password for them.
Using dispositions intelligently is a great, and often overlooked, way to not just improve efficiency, but ultimately, improve your customer experience!
