Tips To Lessen After Call Work Time in The Contact Center
What Is After-Call Work(ACW)?
The work of a Contact Centre Agent is not complete right after the call with the customer is disconnected. After call work or post call work holds equal importance. It includes logging call notes and summaries, assigning and carrying out follow ups, updating the CRM and/or help desk and looking into the customer’s feedback.
If avoided, it can affect with the overall efficiency of the agents and hamper the customer’s satisfaction. However, since it might take a lot of time, it may cut down on the productivity as well. Therefore, it is important to reduce the After Call Work time or speed up it’s process.
Time is not the main thing; it is the only thing - Miley Davis
Below mentioned are a few tips to reduce the ACW time:-
Try to Perform tasks while on the call
Performing certain ACW duties during a call would be beneficial. But, care needs to be taken that it does not affect in the delivery of a superior quality service to the valuable customers. With the help of dynamic scripting capabilities, supervisors can effortlessly guide the agents through a call; provide tailored questions, which will be logged into the customers’ record, after the completion of a call. To ensure that no significant detail is missed out, agents may also take notes while on a call, instead of doing it later.
Go for automating the manual activities
Utilizing a system which can record all the calls automatically and document all the call details such as time, date etc. will make the agents spend more time working for the clients in an effective way. Also, logging all the call records automatically will completely eliminate any chances of error, thus guarantee accuracy. Therefore, removing the manual workload of the agents is a great way to minimize ACW time.
Triggering actions using call dispositions
A call disposition is often used by the virtual contact center solution managers and agents to better understand and optimize performance. It basically describes the outcome of a call, which includes attempted to contact, bad contact information, not interested, appointment set etc. This crucial information can also be used to trigger follow-up emails and workflows, change lead statuses, set future schedules, thus reducing the manual workload of the agent, after a call.
Integrating the business tools
Managing the after call work could be really complicated if a software that can integrate the business tools, is not used. An optimized virtual contact center software would basically reduce the time; one spends in updating the customer data. This indicates that once the agent updates the data on the main database, it would immediately be updated across all the other platforms. Thus, eliminating the need to update each information individually. In addition to this, integrating professional tools also saves agents effort and will lessen after call work by streamlining workflow.
Having an appropriate knowledge base for the agents
It is possible that while working on the tasks at hand, an agent might come up with few doubts and queries, however, it is important to take essential precautions to reduce time wasted on searching for the solutions to these queries. Pointlessly going through manuals, emailing supervisors, asking around for the answers, would not serve any purpose. In such a scenario, having a common knowledgebase, which the agents can refer to, would simplify the things and provide authentic information in a short time.
Going paperless and using electronic signature solution
It is a fact that a lot of after call work time is spent over sending faxes and documents via mail, for the customer to complete and sign. While using an electronic signature solution which integrates with CRMs and other business tools will effectively reduce the requirement of paper in the office and certainly minimize the time spent for completing the after call work.