The call center is a department responsible for answering calls from potential and current customers and handles both inbound and outbound calls. Maintaining good call center metrics is thus important. This means that call centers can be reactive or proactive.
Being reactive, they provide assistance and respond to incoming calls, while proactive is reaching out to respective customers with the company’s offers. Call center metrics can be improved using knowledge management.
Agents’ dependency on knowledge management
Agents working in a call center act as the first point of contact between the company and its customers. Hence they become brand ambassadors of their respective companies, and customers look up to the company based on their experience with the agents.
Key responsibilities and duties of a call center agent involve helping customers across multiple channels, communicating customized solutions effectively, and creating a good customer experience.
Impact of digitization on customer support
The global call center landscape is changing with time and technology, and customers are becoming more tech-savvy. Auxiliaries earlier are now necessary as customer expectations are increasing. Customers today look for better, faster, and smarter resolutions.
Thus if companies want to retain and/or increase their customer base, they need to put customer experience at the top. The right Knowledge Management Software can help achieve all this and move a company to the top of the ladder.
Top 3 Important Call Center Metrics
To measure the efficiency and effectiveness of your call center and identify how well your agents can satisfy customers’ needs, it becomes important to have some reliable and effective contact center metrics.
Thus to track the success and examine various aspects of call centers, certain Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are used.
Listed below are some important call center KPIs which can be used:
1. Average Handle Time (AHT)
AHT is one of the most important contact center metrics to measure the agents’ efficiency. It is total time an agent takes to pick up the call and resolve customer queries. Having too long or too short an average handling time for any organization could mean that agents are struggling to give a proper resolution to the customers.
Thus it becomes important to measure these metrics and provide your agents with tools that can help them to respond quickly to any customer query. This could be attained by having a structured knowledge base that could give all the details of a query with just a single click.
2. First Call Resolution (FCR)
If the issues raised by the customers are not resolved in a single call and involve multiple calls or transferring calls then the customer satisfaction score of your organization is very low.
Thus, there is a need for the right knowledge management software to improve FCR (One of the contact center metrics)rates for improving the customer experience.
3. Service Level
In a specified time the percentage of calls taken by an agent is called service level and it is one of the contact center metrics which can be used to measure the productivity and efficiency of an agent.
This one of the call center KPIs is indicated to both agents and managers in their dashboard to help them improve.
Other call center metrics that matter are occupancy rate, customer satisfaction, post-call work time, speed of query resolution, etc. By measuring all these contact center metrics, one can easily get key strengths and the areas that need improvements.
What is knowledge management?
Knowledge management is nothing but the creation, curation, and distribution of actionable and relevant content for the representatives of a company, such as a call center agents, field staff, retail stores, etc.
It includes having a single source of knowledge across multiple channels, be it digital channels such as chatbots, applications, websites, or assisted channels like contact centers, retail, and field.
The fundamental concept is to design and structure the knowledge base in such a way that it is easy to access the right information at the right time by any agent. Knowledge management not only helps in easier and faster access to information but also helps improve an organization’s overall efficiency to enhance the customer experience.
How does knowledge management help in improving call center metrics?
Knowledge management helps improve call center metrics by increasing the overall productivity and efficiency of the support agents and enhancing customer experience.
Now, when most organizations focus on enhancing CX, it becomes important for the customer experience leaders to have a knowledge management platform that can help their teams provide faster, better, and smarter resolutions to their customers.
Agents and knowledge management
On average, an agent spends approximately 20% of their time understanding the problem and searching for the right information they can give customers.
But with the help of knowledge management software, findability of the right information becomes easier, thus helping agents achieve their core contact center KPIs, while ease to customers helps achieve overall CSAT & NPS scores.
Various studies suggest that a structured knowledge management tool can help reduce average handling time by 20 to 80%, thus increasing competency and satisfaction.
Impact of technical evolution on call center metrics
With technology bringing AI Virtual Assistants or chatbots, it becomes necessary to integrate your business with knowledge management software which could help provide the required information across multiple channels, be it digital or assisted channels.
Knowledge management software will help drive an organized and structured approach to create and store the required information. Some of the qualitative and quantitative advantages of having knowledge management software are :
- Single source of knowledge
- Easy and faster access to knowledge
- Deliver instant actionable answers
- Faster onboarding
- Improved CX with low cost
- Improved UX & EX
- Reduced AHT
- Reduction in call volume
- Increase FCR with intuitive knowledge management
- Increase in efficiency and productivity of agents
- Higher CSAT & NPS scores
- Driving self-service for customers across digital channels
- 360 degrees customer experience platform
Hence, equipping your customer support agents with consistent knowledge and a stable platform is essential to ensure their professional improvement, thus maintaining happy and satisfied customers. This, in turn, is bound to improve your call center metrics in the short term for the long term.
