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An efficient, productive contact center reflects the focus on customer service. Managers, keenly aware of the needed efficiencies and essential customers’ good will, are providing more and more tools to their agents, from customer experience management, advanced helpdesk software, social media customer service tools and even individual agents metrics. Alas, these wonderful tools reside in disparate applications and do not communicate with one another. For agents, new challenges occur, the biggest obstacle being the need to handle multiple search fields.
Customers today have a different frame of reference and expect more from all of their providers, regardless of industry. They expect the same level of exceptional service from online retailers to insurance providers, utility companies and beyond. Regardless of your industry, using an integration platform and guided process such as SpiceCSM allows you to bridge those divides and seamlessly provide superior customer service across any industry providing any service. As you read this article you can add this to the end of every sentence…”SpiceCSM already does that!”
Increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of your agents can help to dramatically improve the results of your call center. Your SLA’s and service metrics will begin to reach their goals and even surpass them, with a few simple steps. Here are 7 ways to increase agent efficiency in your contact center:
So you've decided to use cloud-based Help Desk / CRM software to provide your call center agents with a Guided Process Workflow with which to work from. The question written on the brick wall most people hit at this point is "Where do we go from here?" The answer to this question really depends on a number of characteristics about your organization, and how you will provide support to your customers. SpiceCSM is always a great place to start.
Deployment of any new CSM, CRM, or other customer management or call center software can be a stressful experience for everyone involved. New software leads to challenges on every level of an organization - Support representatives or other employees on the "front lines" will have to adapt to new processes on the fly, with only the prior skills/knowledge they have and the training they were given to fall back on. Management and Supervisor groups will have a similar struggle when dealing with reporting of KPIs and other metrics, as well as the stress placed on the entire organization during the 'cutover' to a new system.
So, if you read my recent blog, "The Tablet's are Coming!", you know that I firmly believe that these new and extremely portable devices will be changing the face of user mobility faster and in more ways than Cell Phones did in the '80's for personal use and customer support. Don't think so? Get your hands on an iPad for more than 5 minutes and then Check this out...www.flipboard.com I'm an even greater believer after leaving my laptop power supply home while on a 5 day trip. Given that I run the business in the cloud, I was able to do everything I needed to do...short of a little spreadsheet work (could have done it but it would have been more tedious).
May 25, 2011 - Major Mid-West University selects SpiceCSM for its internal helpdesk to unify multiple application interfaces. The idea started as a solution to fix the problems that occurred with using student workers. Limited hours caused stress amongst the workers when they could not easily find the information that they were looking for.
I like experiments...in fact I love them. That's kind of how I got involved with Fused Solutions and SpiceCSM. Having grown up in Northern NY and having attended Clarkson University, I wanted to help revitalize an economy that hadn't weathered the transition from agrarian and smoke stack to technology very well. Its a long story but suffice it to say the last several years have been an interesting and fulfilling ride. But that is for a different day back to the experiment of sorts.
Writing repeated memos to customer service / contact center agents every time a business process changes can be stressful. Did they read the email in time? Did you state everything clearly so the process is followed correctly? Where did that one email go again? These are common problems when you can't change the process your contact center agents follow dynamically, in one spot, for every employee. Think of it this way: If your organization is going to experience a large amount of call volume for one particular reason or another, a way to efficiently distribute information about the incoming calls can be very useful to reduce call and queue times, increase first call resolution, and vastly improve customer satisfaction from not having your agents fumbling.
Every day, more human workers are displaced by robots, computers, and other cost or labor saving devices that make business process more efficient while also reducing opportunity for human error. Despite this automation, many companies end up investing more time and labor to fix an automated process than they may have spent by just continuing to employ our friends and neighbors. I would say that the most beneficial, efficient, and cost effective automated processes can be directly attributed to a mastery of the process at hand by the human workers that are being displaced.
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