8 ways to improve call center productivity

HGS Agent X, an award-winning contact center AI software, helps to improve agent productivity, enhance customer experience, and leverage deeper insights. While measuring agent productivity contributes significantly to call center success, improving contact center productivity is even more critical. In today’s market, consumers are quick to point out any negative experiences that can easily cause damage to a brand. Not only can they switch to a competitor in the blink of an eye, but they are likely to share their grievances on social media and other online platforms, hurting the brand image and, ultimately, leading to a loss of revenue for the business.

The importance of controlling contact center productivity

While negative customer experience can hurt the brand image, with strong control over agent performance, customer engagements and revenues can project upward. Therefore, the productivity of contact center representatives should be the top priority for team managers.

Ways to improve productivity in contact centers

As daunting as it may seem to manage productivity, especially in a remote-working environment, contact center AI software is a powerful tool that can easily help achieve this goal. A major part of managing contact center performance and agent productivity has to align with the company goals. Following are a few improvements that contact centers can consider implementing in order to enhance productivity. 1. Multichannel Agents: Diversifying an agent’s work scope across different communication channels, such as email, messaging apps, webchats, etc., will ensure the highest quality of service, leading to a boost in customer satisfaction. It also has a positive impact on the employees’ sense of fulfillment. 2. Agent Training and Onboarding: Contact center software like HGS Agent X are the perfect coaching tools for agents to be well-prepared for all kinds of customer concerns. With smart knowledge management capabilities, it is possible to distribute business-critical information among agents in real time, which facilitates quick agent training and onboarding. Furthermore, AI-powered capabilities and task automation make the job much easier for agents.

3. Self-service: An agent’s involvement in repetitive tasks and customer queries can be significantly reduced with automation. Chatbots and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) are effective and efficient methods that allow self-service to customers. Additionally, having an updated FAQ page on the business website can drastically reduce repetitive calls, queries, and feedback. 4. Customers Segmentation: IVR can sort customers based on account information, historical data, and most frequent requests, thus enabling accurate routing to the relevant representative and saving time for both the customer and the agent. 5. Automation of Repetitive Tasks: The automation of repetitive tasks, workflow, agent training, reporting, and quality assurance reduces an agent’s cognitive load and the average Agent Handling Time (AHT). As a result, customers receive quicker responses and resolutions, and the need for repeat calls decreases. A variety of automated operations can be performed by chatbots and virtual agents with AI capabilities.

The AI-powered Agent Assist and automation tools in HGS Agent X help contact centers automate all repetitive tasks and improve their efficiency and experience. All customer information is easily available to the agents, and AI-driven suggestions help them offer tailored solutions to the customers. 6. Eliminating Avoidable Calls: Eliminating avoidable calls is the first step to optimizing contact center workflow. It makes more sense to turn the attention to customers with challenging issues. Other calls can be easily avoided by having IVR, FAQs, and databases in place. It is also possible to block incoming calls from undesirable callers. 7. Data-driven Environment: We have already discussed how defining and automating the tracking of KPIs is critical to the success of a contact center in one of our blogs. In a data-driven environment, it is easy to generate actionable insights with analytics and ensure a top-notch customer experience through better interactions. It is possible to monitor contact center performances in real-time, thereby presenting the opportunity to drive operational efficiency, quality assurance, and workforce management.

8. Cloud Infrastructure: Introducing a cloud-based contact center software facilitates easy management from anywhere, along with better security and scalability. Scalability ensures that all immediate and evolving business requirements are easily met, saving heavy costs to the company in the long run. Being constantly judged on the numbers that they churn out, contact centers have always been treated as cost centers. Therefore, the CX industry is one of the most demanding industries to work in, so ensuring agent satisfaction and productivity can become extremely overwhelming and taxing for managers. Simply introducing a few adjustments to the contact center operations can spark motivation in agents to deliver quality service, which in turn, will drastically improve customer engagement and satisfaction. In order to build a more productive contact center, ensuring a positive agent environment goes a long way. Ready to build a contact center for the future? Start with improving agent productivity – Learn more in our whitepaper!