How do I Improve my Contact Center Performance?
Managing CX in contact centers across all aspects of the customer journey can be daunting. If you are struggling with how to solve CX performance pain points, you’re not alone. HGS Digital understands that digital solutions can be the right RX for CX challenges. With more than 20 years of experience delivering effective BPM solutions across a dozen different verticals, combined with deep expertise in industry-leading technologies, we understand well the importance of improving contact center performance management.
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In this first article in the “Digital RX for CX” series that focuses on solving contact center pain points, Tim Schuh, President-Digital Strategy, HGS Digital, shares his insights on what’s driving today’s challenges in contact center performance and how digital solutions can offer the right remedy.
What is driving today’s declining contact center performance?
The pandemic accelerated contact center performance challenges. In addition to the challenges associated with transitioning 100% of their workforces from in center to work at home, contact centers also saw significant increases in Covid driven call volumes, and significant talent acquisition pressures. With these combined adverse circumstances; coupled with the challenges of day-to-day contact center operations, it’s no surprise we’re seeing significant degradation in performance.
What is the Impact of poor contact center performance?
A recent study from Uniphore revealed that there has been a 50% increase in hold times during the pandemic. The number of callers who waited more than 30 minutes for a response more than doubled from pre-Covid levels of 26% to 53% during the pandemic. With less experienced agents left to deal with higher than expected transaction volumes you start to see a snowball effect in performance where average wait times get longer, average handle times increase and key customer satisfaction metrics like CSAT and NPS scores are negatively impacted. It sets up a foundation for long-term, negative brand reputational damage which can start to threaten revenue streams.
What the top three steps contact centers can take now to improve performance?
Third, optimize those interactions that can’t be eliminated or automated by providing agents with the tools they need to solve customers’ problems quickly and create a consistent, compelling customer experience whether that’s at 2 a.m. on a Saturday morning or 2 p.m. on a Tuesday afternoon. Implementing intelligent quality assurance, using digitized voice technology to evaluate as much as 100 percent of calls rather than a random sampling, and adopting Agent Assist solutions which leverage analytics and automation to enhance the value of knowledge bases can all be game changers for agent performance.
To combat these challenges, contact centers need to aggressively embrace the mantra of eliminate, automate and optimize.
First, determine how you can eliminate interactions. Analyze your customer journeys throughout the entire lifecycle of a company from a potential customer investigating your brand all the way to servicing that customer through the entire lifecycle of that relationship. There are numerous moments of truth touchpoints along that entire spectrum, and with each one of them there is an opportunity to help inform customers and empower them in such a way that they find their own answers quicker that creates a positive brand experience.
Second, automate the subset of interactions which are repetitive tasks through the use of robotic process automation, bots and other technologies. The automation of repetitive transactions allows agents to spend time addressing more complex interactions. The market is very accepting of these technologies and if you fail to adopt them, your competition will provide a differentiated level of experience to your consumers.
The HGS Digital differentiator
While there are a number of companies that integrate IT systems or focus on capabilities development, one of the things that clearly differentiates HGS Digital is our integration of pragmatic technologists and practicing customer experience professionals. Our depth of experience delivering amazing BPM solutions across a dozen verticals coupled with our deep expertise in industry leading technologies that is driven by our leading cloud technology and contact center AI practice allows us to deliver a much more robust, technology-driven solutions for contact centers.
Best HGS Digital Advice
Leverage the power of your contact center to improve every facet of your company. The information gained from interacting with your customers hundreds of thousands of times a day in your contact center is gold that can be mined to help inform, change and make meaningful, substantive change in your business. These changes can enhance loyalty, drive up average order size and really increase customer retention and satisfaction. Stop thinking of a contact center as a cost center and instead as an enabling capability that can completely transform and inform ways to drive disruptive growth within your organization.
Ready to ramp up your contact center performance? Contact an HGS Digital expert to learn how you can get started delivering better CX and bottom-line business performance.
