San Ramon, Calif. – October 14, 2011 – Research completed by Ventana Research shows that customer service executives and managers can optimize agents’ time by adopting new approaches and supporting systems that can quickly collect and analyze large volumes of data.
Contact center executives and managers are under pressure to provide the best possible customer service while staying within tight operational budgets. This task is increasingly difficult at a time when call centers are receiving more inbound calls than ever and agents must also juggle other kinds of customer interactions including letters, chat sessions, emails, and social media.
“Making use of agent idle time is the best way to prepare and deal with the diversity of inquiries,” said Richard Snow, VP & Research Director. “Our research found that customer service organizations need to provide further automation to improve agent productivity to meet the level of customer experience required.”
In order to demonstrate success, managers and executives must focus on improving agent productivity. The research found that two top priorities for customer service organizations are increasing customer satisfaction, identified by 81 percent of survey participants, followed by first call resolution, identified by 72 percent. The research shows that agent utilization targets are frequently missed and that agent down time is hard to manage, thanks to the challenges that come with dynamic call volumes and patterns.
The research found that companies can achieve maximum agent utilization by adopting new approaches and supporting systems that can collect and analyze volumes of data quickly and thereby enable them to optimize agents’ use of time to much higher degrees of granularity. The research found that metrics being used most often in over two-thirds of customer service organizations include average call-handling time and agent quality assurance scores, which are most focused on efficiency and not on preparation and effectiveness of agents. Companies thus need to review the metrics they use to monitor and assess agent performance and align these more closely with their overall business objectives.
This new research from Ventana Research, the leading business technology research and advisory services firm, provides advisory and education for customer service organizations built on its research over the last decade. Those interested in learning more about this research can find additional information at: http://www.ventanaresearch.com/register/login.aspx?returnurl=/whitepapers/register.aspx?id=2136. As a part of your registration, you will receive insights and education from Ventana Research on using technology effectively in customer service and contact centers. Ventana Research thanks Knowlagent for sponsoring this research and making this research a reality.
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