Posted by: Mike Clarke
The most valuable resource any of us have is our time. In a contact centre environment, we often focus on the allocation of resources to respond to forecasted call volumes or sales targets. We rely on our key performance indicators to identify emerging situations and better inform us on how to respond.
With recessions looming around the globe, how we spend our time has never been more important. When allocating staff time, we need to ensure people focus on revenue generating tasks. This allocation of time applies at all levels within the contact centre.
In an outbound call centre, introducing or improving your auto-dialler solution is an effective way of increasing efficiency across the board. Yet this is only the beginning of the journey.
Keeping agents engaged
As technology has improved over the years, we have increased our expectations of what individual contact centre agents should be able to achieve. Unfortunately, with the focus on getting each agent to generate more revenue, the simple solution is often to just hurry the agent along, making them move faster and shave seconds of each task. At its worst, this can impact customer service and end up regularly losing opportunities for additional revenue.
Contact centres frequently have complex but repetitive after-call processes, yet the tasks themselves add little value to the process beyond simply entering data. By simultaneously requiring agents to perform more functions but to carry them out more quickly, we put them under unnecessary pressure which inevitably leads to mistakes and omissions. These mistakes rather than saving time mean we must invest further time reviewing and correcting those errors, and, in more extreme situations, apologising and compensating for them. The simplest solution is rather than making agents work faster, is to take all tasks possible away from them via automation.
At Greenlight we achieve this by working with our customers to understand the entire business workflow from end to end. More often than not, this provides multiple opportunities to streamline processes, taking repetitive tasks away from agents, admin staff and managers. From simple fixes like ensuring exactly the right information is immediately available to agents when they answer a call to complex API integrations with third party systems removing the need for manual re-entry of data, we have an extensive tool bag of options to save staff time to let them focus on doing what they do best. Our available tools include calculated script fields that can perform any calculation the agent may need to conduct during a call to automatically uploading call recordings based on selected criteria to a site of your choice. Any report can be automated to send at a set time to a given distribution list via email or text, keeping your management team informed. If administrative work is required at the end of a call, then we’ll look for ways to automate this as much as possible too.
By removing unnecessary steps from your agent’s day, we allow them to focus on what people do best, engaging with other people. By further reducing the steps they need to take we also reduce the potential for human error and save the time spent correcting them. These positive steps both reduce the stress from the agent, reducing the negative outcomes of stress such as higher attrition and sick days, whilst shifting the balance of their workload in favour of revenue generating tasks.
Unleash your operations team
Operations teams are notorious for being rigidly focused on keeping the trains running on time. Everyone loves it when things are going smoothly, despite this the key change in approach needed by operations teams is not just making sure the trains are running on time but making sure the train is heading to the correct destination. Much of the time, technology can take care of the timekeeping aspect leaving staff free to focus on setting and adjusting the direction of travel.
Contact centres are a predictably unpredictable environment, built on a system of repetitive tasks yet also presenting new challenges every day. If your operations team focuses heavily on the routine tasks, it can impair their ability to react to unexpected events, potentially until it is too late and the damage has already been done.
Most diallers require regular monitoring to ensure they run smoothly and within industry regulations, yet the actions we take as a result are often predictable. As the abandoned call rate increases, we slow down the dial rate. As the day, week and month progress, regular reports are generated and analysed to identify trends and performance against targets. These actions and dozens more can be massive time-sinks. Dialler managers can lose hours to constantly monitoring the abandoned call rate and tweaking things this way and that to keep the centre compliant or you could let the technology do that for you which frees you up to focus on more critical areas of the business. Managers can spend hours extracting data from multiple sources to produce the reports used to drive business-critical decisions or you can let the system do that for you in a fraction of the time.
Once you bring in appropriate technology for your contact centre the focus should shift from day-to-day coping to the bigger picture. The technology you bring in should be capable of managing any predictable actions whilst still alerting you to the unexpected events that require you to intervene. This isn’t necessarily an overnight transformation, but given time and investment the effect can certainly be transformative.
Why choose Greenlight?
We do not believe in a one-size-fits-all solution. Our onboarding process involves getting a deep understanding of your business and its processes to make sure that we deliver the best possible experience for everyone who will be using it.
Our technology was built to enhance your ability complete tasks, allowing things to flow naturally and encourage you to focus on the tasks that require human intelligence. We remove mundane tasks from your staff which leads to a better environment for them to work whilst being significantly more productive.
With Greenlight you do not just get a supplier. You get a partner who is on hand to support you as your business continues to grow. Our support team are always on hand to assist you should you make any changes to your business that require a different approach.