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Technology Reaches Across Industries to Improve Call Center Quality

by Matt McConnell, CEO, Knowlagent - December 30, 2014

Technology Reaches Across Industries to Improve Call Center Quality
 By Matt McConnell, CEO of Knowlagent


Delivering a positive customer experience is a common goal many organizations can agree upon, no matter what industry-specific initiatives and challenges might be presented along the way. As the “face” of the organization for many industries, the call center is ripe with opportunities for dramatically impacting the customer experience. Two organizations set out to make improvements to this area of operations by improving agent call quality – including first call resolution (FCR) and average speed of answer (ASA) – using a new kind of technology.

On the path to accomplishing these goals, though, both organizations faced potential roadblocks ranging from government regulations to stiff competition during customer interactions. Let’s take a closer look at these issues, and how the organizations were able to achieve their end results.

Two Technology-Driven Success Stories
In the first example, a healthcare sales and account management provider experienced external challenges with federal privacy laws, such as HIPAA and Protected Health Information. With frequent changes to these guidelines, the company’s nearly 6,000 agents needed to be continually informed in order to adhere to regulations. Failure to comply could lead to both civil and criminal penalties - not to mention the negative impact on the organization’s reputation, credibility, public trust and revenue.

The second example involves a telecommunications company. Its potential and existing consumers call inquiring about new services, technical support, billing issues, etc., and the competition is just a phone call away. This group has thousands of agents that needed to know about ever-changing product upgrades, the latest sales promotions and policies to effectively serve its customers.

Internally, executives at both companies faced the ongoing challenge of how to communicate time-sensitive and often complex information to their agents effectively. Added to the equation is the supremacy of service level agreements in the call center environment. They needed a way to get the information to the agents without negatively impacting service levels or incurring the additional headcount costs of scheduling these updates to occur in shrinkage.

Finding the Right Solution
The healthcare and telecommunications companies both engaged with Knowlagent to improve agent productivity and increase performance by deploying the communications essential for agents to be successful in providing excellent customer service. We partnered with each organization to implement RightTime, Knowlagent’s call center productivity platform.

Here’s how these companies create Active Wait Time for their agents: RightTime monitors the automatic call distributor (ACD) to find periods of low call volume; then, routes communications about regulatory updates or training on new products directly to the agents’ desktops during the ‘found’ pockets of time when agents are waiting for a call. Because the technology automatically redistributes time from wait intervals across the entire agent pool to create larger blocks of time for a smaller group of agents, agents are able to expand their knowledge and skills and still be available to protect service levels. If call volume increases during a session, agents are prompted to return to answering calls.

At the healthcare company, the cornerstone of the solution was to provide 15-20 minute sessions delivered directly to agent desktops during idle time. Additional support information was delivered through Questions of the Day and Tips of the Day.

The telecommunications company also incorporated two hours of performance-improving sessions per agent per month during unproductive wait time. On average, each agent completed nearly nine courses in 10 weeks, which would have been a tall order or an expensive one if the company had to hard-schedule the sessions. The organization also reviewed schedules and was able to implement Knowlagent’s call center productivity platform to adjust staffing levels to better serve customers during peak periods.

Knowlagent Delivers Results
When comparing results to their original goals of increasing FCR and ASA, the healthcare provider saw ASA improved by more than 27 percent overall and quality results increased by 1.5 percent. In only three weeks, the telecom company saw a significant impact on FCR due to increased velocity of training deployment and efficiency of training delivery. It was also able to eliminate 18,000 scheduled hours every month.

These are just two examples of companies that have put their agent idle time to work by utilizing Active Wait through the RightTime productivity platform. Additionally, many organizations that represent a broad array of industries – including financial services, telecommunications, healthcare and outsourcers – have applied the technology to achieve similar results against their own key initiatives.


Matt McConnell is the president and CEO of Knowlagent, a leading agent productivity solution provider for the world’s 10 million call center agents. He can be reached at matt.mcconnell@knowlagent.com.

 
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