How Can You Use Automation to Cut Your Hold Time?
“All businesses need to be young forever. If your customer base ages with you, you’re Woolworth’s”
-Jeff Bezos, Founder Amazon
Among various elements pivotal to the success of an organization, the customer service team has a vital role to play. It is upon this team that an organization’s stature and eminence depend in the business world. An organization is in focus either because of its excellent CSAT score or because of poor customer service policies.
What is Customer Service?
When an organization offers a collective set of policies to its customers before, during or after the product has been bought is called customer service. A quality-oriented customer centric approach always ensures that the customers are appreciated, valued as well as treated fairly. CSAT metric or CSAT score of an organization depends entirely upon how frictionless the customers’ journey has been.
Biggest Challenges Faced by the Customer Service Centers
Hurdles are a part of an organization’s road to success. Some of the common obstacles that are faced by any customer service center are:
- They have to serve multiple customers simultaneously.
- One can never be sure about the queries or doubts that a customer might come up with. The inability to answer a customer’s query at times means being one step closer to a poor SCAT score.
- Call transferring from one department to the other is not only time consuming but also questions the customer handling capability of that organization.
- Anguished and impatient customers and low crisis management skills can add to the call center load.
- Absence of the right tools to handle complex situations.
- Lack of synchronization between the customer service work-flow and the customer’s journey.
Among the above stated challenges, the customer service hold time remains the toughest to be tackled. Some customers conclude their ratings of the services on the basis of the hold time itself, regardless of what medium of customer service they are using. The hold time is also known as the average speed of answer or the average call wait time. These longer hold times often escalate to higher call abandonment rate.
Some promising ways to handle the long hold time are:
Accumulate all the relevant information possible from the customer.
All agents might handle the same type of matter differently and effectively. This way these respective methodologies can be streamlined and put up in a cheat-sheet.
Understand the tactics and working patterns of the low hold time agents. The best performing agents can be found with the quartile analysis. The quartile analysis helps in understanding the spread of any metric throughout the call center.
Make sure that the customer profiles are up to date. To be well acquainted with the caller history and the previously held conversations helps in a seamless enquiry and resolution process.
Reviewing the IVR call flow helps in reducing the AHT and overall customer experience.
An online and extensive knowledge base should be created for the agents which can be accessed anytime sans hassles.
An astute call-routing with the help of Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system would help in reducing the long call queues.
Data analytics help in recognizing the call hold time but fail to help in knowing what the customers feel about these lags. The surveys are always a direct way of knowing the customers’ feedback, which in turn would help to throw light on the specific areas requiring improvement.
The two fundamentals to reduce the AHT are:
| While advisors are completing back-end processes | Boosting advisor’s knowledge |
| Advisors should be trained to explain to the customers about what they are doing to solve the issue. An advisor requires about 6-12 weeks of training to reach his or her full aptitude. This is to say that higher advisor attrition rates result in higher hold times. | Some regular training methods can be included in the weekly schedules of the advisors. |
| If the advisor’s desktop needs ways to speed-up the process, it must be recognized. | The knowledge base ought to be reviewed and updated regularly. |
| It should be noticed if any AI or RPA can be used to automate the back-end process. | A separate development plan always works better as it helps to focus upon the specific areas of improvement for every advisor. |
Inclusion of the right AI tools and automation tools have added a significant amount of value to the business especially where the traditional methodologies have failed, e.g., CSA or Conversational Service Automation automatically listens to the customers’ calls and transcribes the calls in real-time. This acts like a co-agent to the agent as it avails with insights and recommendations during the customers’ calls.
NAVOMI stands adept with the AI-enabled communication tools and CRM widget connectors, which would help you to accomplish the business goals in this digitally transformed world. Solutions to all your business problems, is NAVOMI’s forte.