Top Five Ways Technology Can Turn Friend to Foe
Technology, while an essential part of the contact center agent's day, can quickly turn from friend to foe. Who among us hasn't asked a customer inane questions about the local weather, killing time while waiting for a pokey screen pop? In testing contact center software, we've noticed there are five main technology issues that continually surface, negatively impacting agent productivity and generally driving both customers and agents crazy. All are entirely preventable via good testing and technology management practices.
- Misrouted Calls
Most companies now route calls to agents based on their skill levels or customer priority codes. When calls are misrouted, it causes headaches for both the customer and the agent. At best, an agent's time is wasted on a too-simple transaction. At worst, customers are transferred repeatedly. Most often, misrouted calls are the result of programming errors in the center's Computer Telephony Integration (CTI.) system. Others are caused by slow data networks or incorrect network settings.
- Uneven Call Distribution
Is your contact center's call queue growing, while other contact centers within your organization exceed their performance metrics? Blame uneven call distribution, which causes calls to load up on some agents while idle agents remain so. This is usually because the software that is supposed to monitor agent availability in real-time, doesn't perform. To the system, it looks like a call that finished 10 minutes ago is still in progress. This is generally caused by data network latency and service failures.
- Poor Deployment of Speech Recognition Applications
Customers love to hate speech recognition. When it works, it's the greatest. But when it doesn't work -- and it seems like that's much of the time -- it's a disaster. And after a customer is burned by speech recognition once, guess what they'll do automatically the next time? Zero out to an agent, thus lengthening queues and causing agents to deal with mundane issues that should be easily handled in automated systems. Speech recognition applications can fail or perform sub-optimally for many reasons, but the most common are undersized speech resources, poorly designed user interfaces and systems that weren't designed to handle the variability of voice quality across different telephony channels, such as cellular.
- Unpredictable IVR infrastructure
Along with CTI, IVRs are probably the most critical element of a contact center technology system. They also tend to be the most problematic. Large companies often employ several full-time staffers just to monitor their IVRs (and you thought taking calls from angry customers was bad). When an IVR goes down, those calls can sometimes be re-routed to other IVRs. But often, they are instead routed straight to agents, thus lengthening queues and putting customers and agents alike into a crabby mood. Most IVR failures are caused by hardware, middleware and legacy host failures.
- Screen Pop Latency
Herein lies the key to the most perplexing issue for customers: “Why do I need to repeat my account number to you when I've already punched it into the phone?” Slow screen pops cause call-handling times and queue times to increase, while customer satisfaction decreases. Screen pops arrive late, if at all, when systems have trouble coupling customer data with phone calls, and this is most often due to data network latency and vendor interoperability issues.
While these are certainly not the only technology issues a contact center might face, they tend to be the most common. Work with your IT team to ensure that they're doing everything they can to address the sometimes simple issues that can have catastrophic effects on customers and on agent productivity.
Source: contactprofessional.com
