9 Min
Improvement. Better quality. Reaching set goals.
We all have these words or thoughts running through our minds while on an ongoing project. Let us think of the same words under the settings of a contact center.
If you are an agent or a manager, you are always bettering yourself to reach closer to the set point to improve your KPIs.
The generation of ideas is constant, and a mind is a churning machine. But we need to understand that –
“It’s not about ideas; it’s about making ideas happen,” Scott Belsky.
You might have so many ideas on how to improve set KPIs; read on to find out the most cost-efficient way to improve activity at your contact center and make your ideas into a reality.
Table of contents
4 Contact Center KPIs To Measure Success At Call Center
Any activity in life at any point for any purpose has two phases. One would perform any said activity, and the second would measure success. Before we jump on to how to make improvements, we must know what key performance indicators we will be discussing.
KPIs might differ from industry to industry depending on the industry and its nature. Be it BFSI, e-commerce, or even telecom; there are several set goals.
The following are a few contact center KPIs that can commonly be set to measure success at a call center:
1. First call resolution
One of the most important KPIs of a contact center is to make sure to get to the root of the customer’s problem and solve it within the first call. Imagine you are a customer and want an instant resolution for a problem. Already in a hurry to resolve the situation, you might call a contact center after you have tried your own methods.
As a customer you call a contact or a call center you expect them to solve your queries within the first call. This is beneficial not only to the customer in having the problem solved in the first call but also positively impacts the agent solving the problem. First call resolution reflects on how well collected and organized your solution offerings are towards customers.
2. Average handling time
In addition to having a call resolved within the first time. The performance can also be measured on the time frame within which a query is attended to and resolved. Average handling time includes the average of all calls handled in the call center, so this really is the whole group performance result in many ways.
This is also a metric that can be shared with your customers for them to know the time they can expect their query to be resolved in. In this also comes the amount of time you take to reach out to the customer. So if you take 4 hours to reach out to a customer then that would be what the customer expects and the less it is the better.
3. Consistency across all platforms
Just answering queries is not enough and not on one platform. If you want to keep your customers happy, you must know that every customer is different. And it is the contact centers job to keep up with these expectations set by customers across all the channels they would wish to connect for help from.
In today’s world it is an unspoken challenge that a brand needs to connect with customers and be available to them across omni-channels. Not just presence of your problem solving and ability to reach out to your customers also needs to match right from scripting to the way the problem is solved across all these touchpoints.
4. Customer satisfaction
Feedback is the most important metric that keeps a call center going. No matter what the customer says on call, at the end of the day numbers are numbers and they are what reflect the success of call resolution and also how happy or satisfied the customer was with the conversation.
The whole point of having a call center is to cater to the customers’ needs, to be able to solve their queries and help them at every step of the way while offering a product or service. Customer satisfaction, the key or the one metric that overpowers the rest of metrics. So indicating this as a pointer helps set direction for the contact center.
5 best way to improve contact center KPIs
Now that we have discussed some of the key performance indicators at a call center, you must already be thinking on the best ways you are following on achieving this. You might have various ideas in your head to solve a certain problem. It might be hard to implement new ideas at call centers for improved KPI, but not for those who have knowledge management software like Knowmax.
The one sure shot solution to having all the answers and the right means to achieve set goals on the key performance indicators is having knowledge management software. A knowledge management software is a cloud based technology that offers various benefits that help reach customers at all touch points.
The following are few ways through which a knowledge management software can improve KPIs:
1. One knowledge repository for all
At a call center one cannot have various apps to collect information from for the agent and expect the customers problems to be solved. What makes it easier is having all knowledge in a single place or app or a server. This makes an agent’s life 10x easier as only one platform is used to search for answers to queries than when many apps are used.
A knowledge management software helps in storing all your organizational information under one place. This information can be accessed by anyone that has authorization to do so. So any agent working from anywhere in the organization will have the same information. This helps maintain consistency at a call center
2. Dynamic call center script
The world is ever changing so are customers, their tastes and expectations. To cater to customers’ needs and expectations after their feedback it is essential to have scripting tools that help you make changes as quickly as possible. A knowledge management software has agent scripting tools that are dynamic and can be changed according to needs.
Having a dynamic agent scripting tool helps maintain the ability to answer queries in a fast, efficient and a crisp manner. A knowledge management software has dynamic agent scripting tools that help you change call center scripts without much hassle. This helps answer customers’ queries by adapting and improvising on the script at every major change.
3. Visual explanation
Humans respond to visual data more than any other type of data. Using a knowledge management software, you can create scripts that provide visual explanations or guides to customers. The best part about having these guides is it enhances both customers ability to understand in easy visual steps and the agent decreases the average handling time.
Visual guides or explanations are easy to create using a knowledge management software. The software also helps use these guides as a part of self-service guides as a part of the FAQs on websites etc. This is actually a plus point as it could help deflect calls. This helps agents concentrate on existing calls and not feel overwhelmed with many calls.
4. Use of NLP for tone processing
Language is a tough barrier to cross. Naturally to any person their mother tongue or the language they are well versed in makes the conversation easy going. A knowledge management software has the ability to not only process a query in the preferred language of the customer but also understand the tone being used through Natural Language Processing NLP.
How NLP helps improve key performance indicators is that it helps an agent serve the customer by understanding the tone used, for example a knowledge management software though NLP can identify if a customer is angry and suggest replies to help calm the customer and give appropriate solutions.
5. Google-like elastic search
Having knowledge management software is not enough. A knowledge management software should also have the ability to give the call center agent the right solution at the right time. In case you need to use many apps at the call center, to consider knowledge management would ease the process of searching for solutions in seconds.
With google-like elastic search on the platform, the average handling time would significantly decrease as the agent will be able to search for anything by just typing in one word that could be mentioned in the article and the knowledge management software brings up the closest matching results.
Conclusion
To have a knowledge management system would vastly improve your performance on the set contact center KPIs. This is the most cost effective solution that eases the process of helping customers faster and accurately across all touchpoints. This is not just advantageous in one way but it is in three ways for any organization: it helps maintain consistency and quality which helps improve brand image.
For a call center agent, it helps improve productivity and the ability to work without the stress of maintaining the KPIs. For the customer, it means faster query resolution and improved customer experience. To sum it up in one line, we could say implementing a knowledge management system is a total win-win from all perspectives.
