Customer Service: Cost Deflection Out, Customer Experience In, Part 1
CRM News: Customer Service: Cost Deflection Out, Customer Experience In, Part 1: "Cost Deflection Out, Customer Experience In, Part 1"
In this article, David Barrow describes the perfect world of a live agent answering every call with perfect CRM tools by their side that effortlessly guide the agent along to a first call resolution. I think the biggest real challenge for call center managers is how to manage the ever increasing call volumes with never increasing budgets for staff.
You can have all the CRM technology you want, but when there is a call spike and not enough agents to answer the phone, then what happens to the caller experience?
David quotes a study from Zach McCreary at Jupiter that says "self-service deployments continue to exhibit low levels of satisfaction and resolution for customers, spawning recontact through channels -- e.g., phone, e-mail". Every call center manager I talk to says that call volumes keep going up, but they have to keep doing Hoodini acts and magically create agent capacity. I agree that shortening the calls by providing adequate data and direction is the right direction. Planning for staff with call statistcis also helps, but when your business can be affected by unpredictable events, then this data is not helpful. These are only an incremental steps in reducing the load on live agents.
Assisted self service with a hybrid blend of automation and agents with good data coming from CRM is really the next step in dealing with the ever rising tide of calls.
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In this article, David Barrow describes the perfect world of a live agent answering every call with perfect CRM tools by their side that effortlessly guide the agent along to a first call resolution. I think the biggest real challenge for call center managers is how to manage the ever increasing call volumes with never increasing budgets for staff.
You can have all the CRM technology you want, but when there is a call spike and not enough agents to answer the phone, then what happens to the caller experience?
David quotes a study from Zach McCreary at Jupiter that says "self-service deployments continue to exhibit low levels of satisfaction and resolution for customers, spawning recontact through channels -- e.g., phone, e-mail". Every call center manager I talk to says that call volumes keep going up, but they have to keep doing Hoodini acts and magically create agent capacity. I agree that shortening the calls by providing adequate data and direction is the right direction. Planning for staff with call statistcis also helps, but when your business can be affected by unpredictable events, then this data is not helpful. These are only an incremental steps in reducing the load on live agents.
Assisted self service with a hybrid blend of automation and agents with good data coming from CRM is really the next step in dealing with the ever rising tide of calls.
