The evolving role of customer service representatives in today’s modern contact center
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The Team at CallMiner
September 16, 2019
After call work includes all tasks which require completion once your contact center’s agents phone conversations with customers are finished. While there are a number of things that take place outside of phone calls in a call center, “after call work” refers to the specific things completed by the reps and customer service agents who actually take the call.
A few examples of these post-call tasks include:
After call work is one of many essential metrics to track when it comes to gauging the effectiveness of a call center. Average handle time, after call work and other metrics are great definitive data sets that gives a definitive snapshot of numbers. Customer satisfaction and other survey scores are great for improving the overall reputation of your company.
In particular, after call work benefits include:
Once you start tracking after call work time, there are a number of things a call center can do to reduce and improve that time. But first, it’s important to know that reducing the time can also make your call center less effective. Encouraging reps to limit the amount of post-call activities can mean cut corners and less detailed notes.
Here are some tips for effectively reducing after call work time:
1. Help agents know what is critical. “Don’t require your agents to capture every piece of information that is communicated during a call. Instead, teach them what elements are essential to capture during the call. Many organizations use a variation of:
2. Keep all of your processes streamlined. "Any component that offers streamlining the practices of the contact center should be explored. While some methods may not work in certain environments, it doesn’t hurt to take a look and see what may be beneficial.” – Managing After-Call Work in Contact Centers, Contextual Strategy Group
3. Don’t scare reps out of taking good notes. “It’s advisable to ensure that advisors make meticulous notes of any action they take after a call. While calls are usually recorded, ACW can be difficult to track – detailed notes make this much easier.
“Recording progress this way is as much for the advisor’s benefit as the centre’s. Staff might need to demonstrate that they followed a procedure or performed a task, when requested to do so by the customer.
“For example, a customer may call to chase progress on a payment query they have raised. It is much easier to help them if the original handling advisor left detailed notes showing the action they took.” – What Is After-Call Work (ACW) and How Can It Be Improved?, Call Center Helper; Twitter: @callcentrehelp
What are your top tips for reducing time spent on after call work? Maybe better coaching through speech analytics!
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