Happy employees are productive employees -- that’s why continually improving your contact center for your agents is critical. In fact, a well-designed contact center can increase productivity by up to 20%.
To help you make your call center a more ideal (and productive) environment, we've put together these helpful tips.
Contact centers are noisy by nature. That doesn’t change the fact that noise is a major distraction — you should do everything possible to keep your center as quiet as possible. There are a number of ways to reduce background noise, including installing acoustic ceiling tiles, using a white-noise system (ideally an adjustable one), installing internal communication systems (so people don’t shout from one cubicle to another), creating a designated conversation space, restricting the use of mobile phones, adding cubicle padding, and turning up each agent's voice feedback volume.
While contact centers are generally designed for the maximum number of agents, this can cause personal space issues. It can be hard to make agents feel comfortable at their desks due to “real estate” constraints, which is why added spaces like break rooms, lobbies, and kitchens are vital. We once saw a meditation room, which was quite effective. Make the shared spaces feel personal by adding plants (for that connection to nature), comfortable furniture, and refreshments.
Lighting can make a significant difference. Poor lighting can strain your agents' eyes, cause headaches and fatigue, and can even create irritability. A good lighting concept, conversely, can invigorate users, stimulate calmness and reduce overall body fatigue. So, take advantage of natural light wherever possible, pick softer bulbs, use lighting that adjusts with the time of day, use ambient lighting, and use task lighting in areas that are especially dark.
It's hard to focus on selling or customer concerns if you're fussing around with your chair trying to get comfortable. It's even harder to focus if your back is hurting. So, invest in comfier chairs for your agents. And yes, it is an investment, as they aren't cheap—but productivity gains will eventually pay for them in the long run.
If you haven't checked the success and safety of your agents' ergonomics recently, now is a great time to do it. Are their eyes between 24-36 inches from their computer screen? Is the monitor at or under eye level? Can their feet rest firmly on the floor? Are their chairs ever-so-slightly reclined?
A cluttered desk can lead to a cluttered mind, so encourage your employees to declutter their workspace. But don’t go overboard and ask them to keep their desks bare -- there will be items they need to use regularly, or that simply mean something to them (like a framed picture of a loved one).
Changing a paint tone from a bold one to a more relaxing one, like a faded blue, can have a calming effect on your agents. This is because office color affects not only our emotions, but also our physical comfort.
Bad scents are a definite distraction, but a subtle scent can increase focus and cause positive emotions. For example, cinnamon increases focus, and pine and lavender increase levels of alertness.
Ask your employees how the room temperature is working for them. If it’s too cold, it can be easy to lose focus on the task at hand. If it’s too warm, your agents could get sleepy. The ideal temperature for productivity is between 65-68 degrees Fahrenheit.
For more tips on how to improve your contact center, stay tuned to our blog! And if you're ready to upgrade your contact center in terms of software improvements - which can make the biggest difference of all! - check out our selection of enterprise-class software.
Contact centers are living organisms. They grow, fluctuate, and change. Most importantly, with the right team, they improve. Whether you're looking to add to your call center after a change or growth in your company, or even pushback from your customers, we've got you covered.
Below are a number of ways to improve your contact center. You can also visit our case studies page for data-driven information.
Who knows better how to improve your call center than the people who sit there for 8+ hours a day? Your workers are your greatest resource when it comes to improvements. And if you ask them, they'll tell you. Still, you should be sure to ask the right questions, including those about software, headsets, desks, comfort, decoration, noise, customer complaints, and more.
Customer happiness is the holy grail of the contact center. While most effective call centers have quality-assurance plans in place, many still randomly select from less than 2% of calls to check for quality. This tiny sampling is not likely to be an accurate representation of either your worst or best calls. And the only way to improve your center is to learn from the worst experiences and continually expand from the best. Using tools like data and speech analytics will help you identify trends and potential call issues.
If quality assurance is a big priority for your business, consider leveraging modern technology to begin scanning 100% of your calls. Thanks to modern advances in speech analytics, you can now do something you've never done before: monitor 100% of your calls. You can set up predefined modules, such as a predefined greeting, information verification, empathy tracking (incredible but true!) and proper closing procedures and techniques. Keep in mind that speech-tracking software isn't perfect yet and none have 100% accuracy. So when you're alerted to an improper greeting or close you need to look at numbers for that agent overall, and not just on that single call.
Quality assurance and client satisfaction aren't necessarily the same thing. It is possible to have a high quality-assurance score on a call with an agent but then a lower rating for the service provided (via a client survey)--and vice versa. So treat and handle the situation accordingly.
Quality assurance shouldn't be a punishment that your agents are afraid of. If that's what it has become for you (which happens often), reframing it in a way that takes the sting out will help your agents become less defensive and more participatory. This can be accomplished by involving them more in the process and creating a reward system for positive QA. So, ensure they are well aware of the evaluation process, and ask for their input on how to improve from your end, too.
Another great way to reframe quality assurance is to offer a self-evaluation process. By evaluating themselves, employees become more educated about and invested in the process. Yet another way to get agents involved in the process is to empower them to flag calls that they find challenging without a QA score, so that they can learn how to better deal with a call without fear of punishment.
For more tips on how to improve your contact center, continue to follow our blog —or contact us.
There is a disconnect between the agents who use contact center technology and the upper management who control the budget and could approve its upgrade. This disconnect can make it hard for workers and middle management to get the technology they need to improve their productivity and results. It isn't a lost cause, however; you just need to frame it in a way that upper management will understand—because they think differently than those of us on the frontline.
To convince upper management that your office could benefit from new technologies, you need to use high-level strategies, like the following presentation tips:
New forms of technology and software offer valuable analytics-powered tools that allow your company to better measure their success. By starting with baseline numbers, you can highlight for your upper management teams the areas that are lacking, and illustrate how the new tools will help improve on and measure those numbers. Setting (and then meeting) the proposed improvements and goals you make will help build credibility on this and future technology projects.
Before presenting your proposed technology, you'll want to come up with all the potential pushback concerns. For example, if you're proposing new analytics-based tools that can help them improve the overall customer experience, they may say, “But then I have to learn a new toolset, and that takes time.” Your rebuttal can be a demonstrated learning curve that takes only X amount of time.
One major issue that upper management commonly sees in new technology implementations is the time needed to upgrade or switch to it. By setting forth a plan that details exactly how implementation will be handled, and then demonstrating that any time spent there will save time and money going forward, you can win management over by defusing that objection.
While this advice might seem counterintuitive, for management, many times it all comes down to the bottom line. Without knowledge of the costs, the rest of your presentation may be moot, so it’s important to include this information. However, it is definitely also important to include how much money this new technology will save your company, in order to put those costs into perspective.
In terms of the types of technology that your call center might be upgrading to, there are a number of upper management-friendly benefits to point out. Let's discuss the two biggest ones in the contact center industry: Workforce management/optimization software and voice of the customer software.
A workforce management and optimization software suite is likely exactly what your upper management didn't know they needed. It turns call recordings into a searchable-by-criteria action items, provides analyzation tools for quality assurance, offers dynamic customer surveys, and offers web-enabled staffing management tools . And, those technologies integrate with each other—a true powerhouse of benefits.
Voice of the customer can be the ideal software for an upper management team as it helps turn quality-assurance monitoring from a stagnant data center full of call recordings into a real-time, speech-analytics-powered monitoring solution that is actionable.
If you're still unsure that you have enough points to convince your upper management to move to a workforce management/optimization or voice of the customer software, don't hesitate to call us here at KOVA. We've helped a number of companies pull the trigger through an upper management tech buy-in, and we’d love to help your business, too.
Slowly, but surely, data analytics is beginning to see use in nearly every facet of our lives. Compiling and analyzing huge amounts of data can bring about some surprising and advantageous discoveries. For instance, police departments across the nation have found that they can use big data to predict and help prevent crime.
The Los Angeles Police Department may be the most famous story about the power of data analytics. It started with a mathematical model to predict aftershocks during earthquakes. Predicting earthquakes is difficult, but predicting the aftershocks is actually much easier. Once an earthquake occurred, the mathematical model was able to accurately predict the aftershocks that would follow.
Interestingly, the model for predicting aftershocks had a lot in common with the patterns of criminal activities. It seemed that whenever a crime was committed in an area, more crime was likely to occur—much like the aftershocks from an earthquake. So after tweaking the model, police had an idea not only of where crime already occurred, but where it was most likely to occur in the future.
At first the police officers were reluctant to use the software over their own ideas about where to patrol, but were quickly convinced of the software’s effectiveness. The model is now being continuously updated with new data, helping to make it even more effective at predicting where crime may occur next. LA saw an astounding 33% reduction in burglaries and 21% reduction in violent crimes in areas where the software is being used.
And it’s not only robberies and violent crime that data analytics can help prevent. In Durham, police were able to break up an insurance fraud scam involving an organized crime group defrauding insurance companies. There were so many accidents in the area that insurance premiums jumped well above the national average. With analytics, it was easy to spot a core group of suspect claims, and 70 people were arrested.
In the past, law enforcement just didn’t have access to this kind of information, or they weren’t able to use it effectively. Collecting data on crime in a city is one thing, but using that data to determine where crime may occur takes a lot more work.
When law enforcement works with the best new technology, they have the ability to make our streets safer, and help prevent crime. That’s why KOVA created SilentPartner, a revolutionary new app that turns your smartphone into a mobile recording device. SilentPartner allows you to capture photos, videos, and sound, and easily label them and securely transmit the data to an office database.
Like we saw in Los Angeles and Durham, collecting and analyzing data is becoming vital to police work, especially as criminals upgrade their technology, too. SilentPartner is exactly what law enforcement, or anyone who works in the field, needs to gather data on-site, and easily label, categorize, and transmit that data.
Check out our FAQ page, or contact KOVA today to see more about how SilentPartner can revolutionize the way you do your job.
Call centers are known for having some of the highest turnover rates in any business. This means the hiring process is nearly constant, and that can put a lot of strain on management, taking up time and energy. The best way to cut down on the amount of time spent hiring is to do it better in the first place. Hiring the right candidates for the right reasons will go a long way towards cutting down on your turnover and keeping the hiring process manageable. Here are just a few ways you can improve your hiring process and save time and money at your contact center.
Before you actually interview and choose candidates, you should have an ideal candidate in your head. Work with your team, including your best call center agents, and draw up a list of characteristics or abilities that would make an ideal candidate for the job. You might not get a candidate that displays all of those qualities, but you’ll be closer to finding a good fit than you would be otherwise.
Look at your recruiting tools and decide if they’re working for you as well as you’d like. For example, if you’re always using the same job boards, career sites, or recruiters, then you may be getting a certain type of candidate. Try switching up the ways you recruit to find the type of candidates you want to attract.
It’s important to disclose everything about the job that potential employees want to know. Tell them about all the requirements, any unconventional work schedules or shift requirements, and anything else that will be important for them to know. You’re less likely to have high turnover if employees know exactly what the job requires going in.
If you’re hiring call center agents, that means they’re going to be on the phone quite a bit. So why not have the initial interview over the phone? Their communication skills are going to be tested every day, so it makes sense to figure out right away if they just don’t have what it takes.
Once you hire new agents, you would be wise to survey them at different points along the way. During recruitment, a few weeks after they start, and a few months into the job are good times to get feedback. You’ll end up discovering new ways to improve the process, and possibly prevent turnover before it happens.
Building on this, conduct exit interviews to see exactly why your employees leave. You’ll probably see some trends, and from there you can work to improve the process or change the type of candidate you hire next.
It may seem like high turnover rates are unavoidable, but they don’t have to be if you put the work in during the hiring process. If you want to get the best out of your contact center agents, then check out our Verint Media Recorder Workforce Optimization suite. Contact us today for more information on how we can help free up time in your schedule and increase your contact center’s productivity.
When you’re hiring someone for a high-stress job like a 911 dispatcher, the hiring process must be as thorough and precise as possible.
While there are always new hires who will end up not working out - sometimes before they even begin working - it’s important for 911 centers to do what they can to minimize these numbers. The turnover rate for 911 dispatchers is high, and many counties are incredibly short-staffed. These factors, plus the financial cost of losing new hires, make it especially difficult for 911 centers to lose employees during the training period or shortly after.
So what can hiring managers do to ensure that they’re hiring not just dispatchers, but great dispatchers?
Every candidate knows that being a 911 dispatcher is a stressful job. And most people think they can handle stress just fine. But as any 911 center manager knows, once someone is actually on the phone with someone in a life or death situation, they may find that their ability to handle stress isn’t as great as they thought.
While there’s no surefire way to test a person’s performance under stress, even with simulated training calls, one thing you can do is seek out people who’ve previously proven themselves in stressful situations.
To do so, make sure that it’s a prominent question during the interview process. You can also ask follow-up questions about how the person relieves stress, both at home and on the clock.
Any HR professional will tell you that body language can offer revealing insights into a person’s personality and work style. For a job like this, you want to look for people who convey confidence, without appearing arrogant. This means individuals who sit with their backs straight and their chests open, who project a calm demeanor.
Red flags to pay attention to are:
In order to increase your chances of hiring the right person, it can help to assess the job position you’re hiring for in terms of necessary strengths, rather than just job functions and experience.
To become a 911 dispatcher, a person must be resilient, practical, compassionate, efficient, and able to multi-task - among other traits. Are you asking questions that will allow you to see whether your candidates possess these qualities? Or are you stuck mostly on experience, asking more about a candidate’s previous work than anything else?
For professions that are regularly short-staffed, like 911 dispatching, it can be tempting to simply assume that a promising candidate will also naturally fit into your organization’s culture.
However, this can be a pricey mistake to make. It’s important to assess your candidates’ personal qualities as well as their professional ones to ensure that if they are hired, they’ll fit in well with the rest of your team.
Even though dispatching is largely a job in which one works alone, there are always times - in any profession - in which workers must come together as a team. If one person has a strikingly different personality or skill set than the rest of your workers, it will be much harder for that person to succeed.
To learn more about making your PSAP an efficient and successful workplace, read our post “How to Avoid Common PSAP Workplace Problems.”
When customer service executives and thought leaders in the customer service space talk about the future of their industry these days, they almost invariably say the same thing: the future of customer service is self-service.
Many companies have already bought into this idea wholeheartedly, and started offering things like detailed FAQ pages on their websites, or self-service menu options for contact center callers. These are great places to start, but what are the next steps?
In a survey conducted by Steven Van Belleghem with SSI, 90 percent of respondents said that speed was the most important issue when trying to resolve an issue with a company. This was second only to having their problem taken seriously by the customer service agent, which was selected as most important by 92 percent of respondents.
In a certain sense, this is nothing new. Contact centers have long worked hard to decrease their call handle times and increase their first-call resolution rates. But in today’s digital, omnichannel world where agents are handling emails, texts, and live chats in addition to phone calls, resolving things quickly becomes more complex.
According to that same survey, 39 percent of respondents who contact a company via email expect a reply within four hours. For those who use social media to contact a company, that rate goes up to 55 percent.
The takeaway here is that today’s definition of “speed” is different from what it was even two or three years ago. In addition, any move toward self-service must work toward allowing customers to resolve their issues as quickly as possible - meaning that contact centers must make relevant information easy to find and understand, as well as know which issues will still require the help of a live agent. (To read more about this topic, read our post “Getting Customer Self-Service Right.”)
Self-service is often discussed in the context of resolving customer issues, but it should be a part of the entire customer journey.
Contact centers should do their best to integrate self-service options into everything from initial service inquiries, to product or service purchase, to post-sales follow-ups and issue resolution. Customers want to be able to access information about the product they’re interested in, fill out necessary forms or applications, and make the actual purchase on their own.
These options must be easy to locate on a company’s website, as well as easy to complete. Doing so will help you push your customer service further ahead of the pack, and closer to the self-service model of the future.
The consensus among experts, according to Verint’s Executive Perspective “The Future of Self-Service,” is that the ultimate customer service model of the future is the virtual personal assistant. Think of the iPhone’s Siri or Windows’ Cortana - these are initial versions of virtual personal assistants, able to read your calendar, send you reminders, scan your email, and more.
Speech recognition technology is the key to making these personal assistants useful, so as it continues to get better, so too will our personal assistants.
So how does this affect contact centers? Well, speech recognition is already an important part of the data-driven contact center, as speech analytics technology can offer incredible insight into the customer experience.
Another vital element of tomorrow’s self-service model is data. With the vast amounts of data that speech and text analytics will offer - not to mention the data-collecting abilities of software solutions like workforce management solutions, workforce optimization suites, and more - the contact center that isn’t putting this data to good use will quickly fall behind.
If KOVA can help you learn more about whether one of these solutions might be right for your contact center, contact us.
As a contact center manager, there’s no doubt that you spend a lot of time thinking about how to improve your customer experience. Self-service options, speech analytics, multi-channel communication, even workforce optimization software - today’s contact centers have lots of tools available to them when it comes to serving their customers.
But how do you know which of these tools are the most effective? How do you know what your customers are really thinking? Take a look at this infographic to learn more.
Want to improve your customer experience even more? Check out this video on The Power of the Voice of the Customer.
Despite being part of the same business, the front office and back office rarely work very well together.
The customer-facing front office is concerned with customer satisfaction and quick issue resolution. The back office is concerned with longer-term tasks - things like remaining compliant, maintaining the budget, or evaluating legal issues.
Because the work of these two divisions is so different, it can often feel like they’re working at cross-purposes. Given these differences, it may seem counterintuitive that a workforce optimization (WFO) solution that has been successful in the front office could also work in the back office.
However, it turns out that the benefits of workforce optimization can absolutely be extended into the back office - especially when the back office solution is a part of the same system that works in the front office.
Here are some benefits of bringing workforce optimization into your back office.
When a single WFO solution is in place, management is able to centralize staffing and workload distribution. Instead of toggling between two different systems, which makes it nearly impossible to see the big picture, managers can view the entire enterprise as a whole.
This makes a huge difference when trying to identify trends, locate trouble areas, and forecast workload.
When a WFO suite is accessible in both the front and back office, it allows you to “blend” your workforce.
That’s not meant literally, of course - front- and back-office operations require different sets of skills, which is why your employees work where they do. However, that doesn’t mean that the front and back offices can’t improve their collaboration.
According to the whitepaper Bridging the Gap Between the Front and Back Office by Aspect, 60 percent of customer dissatisfaction is due to some sort of problem in the back office - even though customers never come in contact with those employees.
A WFO suite can be a great solution to this problem. By providing that centralized management, a WFO solution can help managers improve the way the front and back offices work together by improving communication throughout the contact center as a whole.
For example, managers can:
In order to decrease those complaints that are related to back office problems, the front office and back office have to communicate more effectively.
After all, if the front office doesn’t know what limitations the back office is dealing with, front office workers can’t offer the best solutions to customers. And that goes in reverse, too: if the back office doesn’t know what complaints the front office is getting regularly, they can’t do anything to improve their processes.
A good WFO suite will give all employees access to real-time information, which is a vital part of reducing customer handle times and reaching resolution more quickly.
For example, let’s say a credit card customer called the company to check on the status of a credit line increase application. Typically, the front office worker would have to contact the back office to ask them to investigate the status of the application. This, naturally, results in at least one customer hold while the call-taker transfers the information to someone who can find out the answer.
With a WFO suite that extends to front and back office, however, the front office worker can simply check on the application status himself, accessing the same real-time updates that the back office workers do.
Workforce optimization suites aren’t just for the front office - they can work wonders for an organization as a whole. Learn more about how a workforce optimization solution like Verint Media Recorder can help your company here.
Giving great customer service doesn’t seem like it should be that hard. Hire nice people, train them well, provide them with the tools they need to do their jobs, and amazing service should follow naturally - right?
If only it were that easy. Assuming you’ve got the right people working for you (let’s leave aside, for now, the issue of how difficult it often is to find those people), giving consistently excellent customer service requires a complex mix of solid training, true empathy, and a culture of customer care that stretches from the top of the organization on down.
So how do you start transforming your customers’ experiences from OK to amazing? Here are a few ideas from three companies that are doing it right.
Ace Hardware, the chain of neighborhood hardware stores that has nearly 4,900 locally owned locations all over the world, trains its employees to be not just nice, but helpful. As customer service expert Shep Hyken writes on his blog, “Anyone can be nice … but [Ace Hardware VP Tom Knox] wants more. He wants his people to be nice plus knowledgeable.”
You can hire the kindest people in the world who honestly want to make your customers’ experience great, but if they aren’t able to fulfill that customer’s needs, you haven’t won. The customer probably won’t be angry. They’ll probably give you another chance. But if they can find a place where the people are nice as well as knowledgeable (which is how Ace defines “helpful”), then you can bet they’re going to take their business there.
Discover, which has been credited with revamping the credit card business as a whole, got the highest scores for customer satisfaction among U.S. credit card companies in 2015, and the company garners consistently great reviews from the people who use it.
What’s their secret? Don’t be afraid to pioneer new methods and ideas. For example, Discover CEO David Nelms says in a Forbes article about customer service that his company pioneered the 24-hours-a-day, 7-days-a-week customer service model for credit card customers. This is because one of the keys to customer happiness, they found, was enabling customers to connect with the right employee right away.
To that end, Discover’s phone options include the option to connect with a real person immediately. In an industry where the customer isn’t always treated with respect, this really makes a noticeable difference for customers. And it never would have happened if Discover had just gone along with the typical industry practices.
Apple may be one of the best-known examples of a company that obsesses over every aspect of its customers’ experience. It all started, of course, with Steve Jobs, whose “take nothing for granted” philosophy encompassed everything from product design to functionality - and customer service.
By employing rigorous analysis of what their customers want and need, Apple has been able to consistently present an excellent, holistic customer experience.
This laser focus on the customer at every level of the company has helped Apple become one of the top companies in the world for brand loyalty. When it comes to customer-facing positions, like the Apple store geniuses and phone tech support, employees are trained to listen or watch for emotional cues, to employ empathy and listen closely to customers’ issues, and to avoid using certain words - “crash,” “incompatible,” and “problem,” for example - that Apple has found to heighten a customer’s anxiety.
The final lesson from this tech giant? Apple employees are empowered to do what is right for the customer, without needing to go through an unwieldy or frustrating approvals process.
Offering great customer service is a complex directive, but the payoff is well worth it. To learn more about how to help your contact center improve its customer experience, watch our video Call Center Solutions for Superior Service.
