Contact Centre Best Practice

High-quality professional customer support is crucial to building lasting customer relationships. Contact centres represent the voice of many organisations, existing as the first point of contact for customers engaging with your organisation.

There is no better gauge as to the importance of customer experience when engaging with a brand’s contact centre than the millions of social media complaints that consumers have about their experience.

If you’ve been in the contact centre space for more than a few hours, you’ve likely heard some version of the unofficial motto “Connecting the right interaction, to the right agent, at the right time.”

If you’re a manager within a sizable workforce, you’ve likely heard of gamification. This new type of technology has completely revolutionised the way training and management is conducted throughout the professional careers of your agents.

The quality of service and efficiency of how a contact centre is run directly impacts its ability to be successful. Technology is always advancing so to remain competitive it is important for every organisation to regularly review the systems and processes.

As many countries around the world have been in lockdown, businesses that were offshoring contact centres have had to adapt quickly and find other ways to manage customer enquiries.

Here’s a list of 10 key metrics that can be used by contact centre managers to ensure the delivery of both strong customer experiences and financial performance through workforce efficiency.

IVR’s…love them or hate them, they are an almost ubiquitous part of the contact centre industry and have been around for a very long time. In fact, according to Wikipedia, the first commercial IVR system was built to perform order entry and inventory control back in 1973, although the technology was certainly in its infancy, and considered expensive and difficult to implement.

Since the beginning of 2020 and the inception of COVID-19, contact centers have had to make adjustments as to the way we work and employees' daily lives. This shift in the workplace proved to be specifically challenging for contact centers and help desks. Agents were used to being in an office and not working virtually. The change to in-person and effectively assisting customers had to take place quickly and efficiently. On any given day, agents might experience more extended workdays due to higher call volume, handling of complicated subjects, and customer complaints, and aggravation.