8 Technologies That Help to Improve Agent Productivity

Colin Hay of Puzzel outlines eight technologies available in the cloud to boost agent productivity and customer satisfaction in one go.

The Eight Technologies

Let’s consider technology to boost cost-effectiveness and operational efficiencies along with agent and customer happiness.

In purely alphabetical order, look out for the following:

1. CRM

Today’s cloud-based solutions link seamlessly with some of the world’s most popular customer relationship management (CRM) applications to give agents a complete and instantaneous view of essential caller information, without switching between multiple screens, to deliver a highly personalised response.

2. Intelligent Call Routing

A step up from traditional premise-based Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) systems, today’s technology has sophisticated intelligence built in to route customer calls automatically from a variety of channels to the best-skilled available agents quickly and efficiently.

3. Interactive Voice Response (IVR)

This technology routes inbound calls to the relevant agent or department and enables self-service by automating simple transactions such as bank balance look-ups, submitting utility meter readings, ordering popular products or listening to public transport timetables.  It offers customers a 24-hour service without the extra staffing or operational costs.

4. Outbound Dialling

The perfect support for marketing, this facility enables agents to make outbound campaigns to a given list of contacts in a flash.  Why not schedule the system to provide outbound services during off-peak hours without the need for manual intervention?

5. Post-Contact Surveys

Gather meaningful customer feedback by developing simple, short, multiple-choice-style surveys targeted at different customer groups and in real time.  Tap into the huge global mobile market by exploiting SMS technology.

The latest survey functionality works by automatically sending the caller a survey text message just after a completed call with one of your contact centre agents. The caller can then respond with a rating and/or with additional comments.  Just be sure to act on feedback – good and bad – to further improve and exceed customer expectations.

6. Quality Management and Call Recording

Develop insightful, focused quality programmes that incorporate the “voice of the customer” to drive deeper customer engagement and support better decisions on products, services and processes.  Supplement this with call recording to build up an easy-to-access audio catalogue of all enquiries.

By efficiently retrieving, managing, listening and sharing all or selected voice and chat conversations, contact centre supervisors can resolve complaints quickly and make meaningful operational adjustments for enhanced customer service.

7. Voice Analytics

The logical extension to call recording is today’s voice analytics technology which retains and mines the entire content of calls that were previously defined only by keywords and phrases.

Modern voice analytics can recognise accents, dialects and slang and can even accommodate specialist words such as technical or industry terminology.

Analyse and categorise calls based on how customers express themselves and then use this information to correct processes, address service issues and gain distinct competitive advantage.

8. Workforce Management

Finally, don’t forget your agents, they are essential to delivering first-class customer service.  Take strategic control of an increasingly dispersed, virtual workforce by integrating the latest cloud-based WFM technology into your contact centre.

Colin Hay

At a glance, view agent skills, availability and preferences to ensure the right agents are deployed to the right enquiries at the right time. Be ready for seasonal peak periods and upcoming marketing campaigns by accurately predicting staffing levels and associated staff costs. This boosts agent effectiveness and retention while accelerating first contact resolution for customers.

Bring together these top eight technologies into one integrated cloud-based platform to create your best-performing contact centre. This will help you to access the full benefits of the cloud.

Author: Colin Hay