Bob and Joe walk into the hospital with stomach pain.
Bob is seen in 15 mins. After a short examination, he is sent home with paracetemol, being told that symptoms should improve.
Joe waits 90 mins to be seen, and after a more detailed examination, he is told he is suffering from appendicitis and given an urgent appointment to see a specialist.
Two days later, Bob returns to A&E in even greater pain. After a longer examination, he is told he too has appendicitis…
Who do you think is the more satisfied? Who has expended less effort and is more likely to speak highly of the staff?
In contact centers, as in hospitals, the issue of speed versus quality is a balancing act.
On the one hand, speed keeps costs down, achieving maximum productivity and highest turnaround from your resources. It reflects a view of the contact center as ‘cost generator’ which must be streamlined and optimised.
On the other hand, achieving and maintaining a high quality service pleases customers, converting them into brand advocates. It reflects a view of the contact center as ‘revenue generator’, as loyalty builder, as value-adder.
A successful contact center sets and maintains an appropriate balance of speed and quality objectives, appropriate to their business goals.
The right balance depends on the nature of the business; outbound/ sales operations may lean toward speed/ throughput. For customer service operations, the culture is shifting toward quality. This is partly due to the rise in self-service options. Back when people called the call center for a balance enquiry, a price quote, or simple help query, it was quite reasonable to measure success as cases handled per hour. But these types of calls are increasingly handled by IVR, or online FAQs, and the remaining calls are of a more complex nature, needing more research, knowledge and careful handling. Speed is no longer necessarily a good thing.
But keeping a proper balance is not easy. Let’s look at how balance is set.
Whether by choice or accident, the balance within your organisation is largely set by:
- measuring something
- letting agents know that you are measuring it
- feeding back to them their performance in that area
Agents as a rule want to do a good job, and will aim to reach whatever standard is set for them for the high priority metrics.
This means that what you are measuring and feeding back to them is what will improve. To a large extent, the data you are collecting and reporting on is dictating your balance of speed and quality.
Promoting either can cause side-effects. If you communicate that your highest priority metrics are speed-related, e.g. calls handled per hour, average handling time, idle time, etc, effects may include
- bad quality contact and unhappy customers
- repeat calls
- customers feeling rushed/ brushed off
- missed opportunities for up-sell/ cross-sell
- reduced politeness
- loose adherence to script and policy
Agents may rush through calls, take shortcuts, or transfer to colleagues – anything to keep what they are measured against from looking bad.
On the other hand, quality can be promoted by immediate and easy to measure metrics such as longest wait time, number of calls in queue, as well as those which are valuable but rather harder to measure, such as CSAT, customer effort score, agent score, first contact resolution. But place too much emphasis here and turnover may slacken, idle time may increase, or agents may take longer over wrap-up.
What’s needed is a holistic approach. There is a sweet spot where agents are motivated to aim for the right balance of speed and quality for your business. A well designed set of metrics tailored to your business goals is critical. This is why the concept of a balanced scorecard makes sense, placing several productivity metrics and several quality metrics side by side. In this way, all stakeholders from management to agent workforce get a balanced view of business priorities, resulting in improvement on all fronts.
The right balance will not only create harmony throughout your organisation, it will also produce the greatest satisfaction for the customer. After all, if you have to be told you have appendicitis, it’s much better to know within 15 mins! (I think…)
What We Offer
Sytel Limited develops and supplies Softdial Contact Center® (SCC) – multimedia, multichannel, fully blended cloud contact center solutions.
Available by subscription as CCaaS, fully managed and supported by Sytel, or for quick and easy deployment by partners and enterprise users.
All Sytel cloud components are secure, resilient and scale seamlessly from 10 agents to 10,000+, whether local, mobile or remote.
Flexible Contact Center Software
Softdial Contact Center™ – rich functionality, all-in-one, designed to deliver at scale
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Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS)
CCaaS for subscribers – global service, with no upfront costs
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Contact Center Platform – CCaaS Partners
Build your own CCaaS business using the power and flexibility of Sytel software
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Contact Center Platform – Enterprise
High performance platform to drive contact center productivity – cloud, on-premise or hybrid
Blended Media Desktop
Fully customisable, multi-channel, multi-session workspace
Work Anywhere
Browser-based tools, no software installation required
Customise, Localise, White Label
Design all user interfaces to individual requirements
Integration via APIs
‘Swap out’ components and integrate with 3rd party apps
World Class Development
Continuous evolution pushing technical boundaries
Capabilities
Softdial Contact Center™ (SCC) is designed to be flexible, extensible and scalable, integrating with any legacy equipment, and meeting the most complex of requirements.
All Media Channels
Voice, chat, email, social, etc – fully integrated and blended
Agent Multi-Tasking
Work with multiple live contact sessions of any media channel
Dynamic Workforce Management
Optimise agent usage and balance workloads in real-time without human intervention, across all media channels
Predictive Dialing
Best-of-breed performance under compliance
Optimised Inbound Routing
Smart rules and ‘best-available’ decisions to drive great customer service
Agent Scripts
Help agents achieve and maintain excellence
Voice and Screen Recording
See and hear exactly how agents are interacting
Analytics and Data Feeds
Measure and evaluate performance at every level
IVR, Bots & Conversational AI
Design effective automated flows or integrate with 3rd party providers
Customer Journey Tracking
Stored customer contact history, to aid routing and add context to conversations
Modules
Drive operational efficiency, increase customer satisfaction & improve agent performance
Softdial One™
Highly flexible unified web UI for agents, supervisors and administrators
Softdial Scripter™
Create complex process flow scripts for agents, IVR, chatbots and other applications
Sytel AI Dialer™
Maximum predictive dialing performance, under any compliance rules
Softdial Pathfinder™
Precise routing rules for ‘best available’ connection
Softdial Media Server™
Core telephony functions to manage all inbound/outbound SIP calls
Softdial Reporter™ 5
Fully customisable performance stats, charts and reports, across all channels
Softdial Publisher™
Comprehensive data output to build your own reports
Softdial Recording Monitor™
Audio and screen recording of agent activity to ensure the highest standards
Softdial Campaign Manager™
Automation to optimise any outreach strategy
Softdial Repository™
Central storage and configuration of common resources
Sytel Global Compliance™
Flexible ‘no contact’ rules to protect contact center and consumer
Solutions
Performance and efficiency for a wide range of business applications
By Business Type
Enterprise
A full featured contact center software solution, designed for optimum performance at scale
Small/ Medium Business
Options for SMBs to subscribe to our full-featured cloud service managed and hosted by either one of our partners or by Sytel themselves
By Industry
Customer Service
Connect quickly to well equipped agents
Market Research
Best-of-breed predictive dialing with CATI integration
Debt Collection
Automated inbound/ outbound blending integrated with any debt management app
Sales & Telemarketing
Maximise agent productivity with best-of-breed predictive dialing
Healthcare
Secure, highly-configurable multichannel communications for excellence in patient care