How a blended environment can help you optimise productivity in your contact cen...

Monday, 21 June 2021 17:40

How a blended environment can help you optimise productivity in your contact centre

By Daniel Harding, MaxContact

Daniel Harding, Director – Australia Operations, MaxContact

GUEST OPINION by Daniel Harding, Director – Australia Operations, MaxContact: Historically, agents have either made calls or answered them but new generation contact centre technology makes it possible to do both.

Here’s a question for any business owner or leader whose operations include an inbound customer service centre. How much time do your agents actually spend doing the job you’re paying them to do: answering the phone and resolving enquiries for customers? In some organisations, it’s as little as 10 per cent of the working day. The remainder of the time is spent waiting for calls to come in.

Of course, analysing activity patterns can help you to optimise your roster, by putting the minimal number of agents necessary to maintain acceptable service levels on the various shifts. But even after you’ve done so, you could be looking at an awful lot of unavoidable downtime every day, week and month of the year.

And if your contact centre is based in Australia, it’s expensive downtime. The average base hourly rate for agents in our part of the world is $23.50, according to Payscale. Wages comprise the largest part of any contact centre budget – on average around 80 per cent of the total annual spend.

A high-tech solution to the productivity puzzle?

Until recently, this has been an intractable issue. But new generation contact centre technology can offer a potential fix, at least for enterprises that run both inbound and outbound operations.

Implementing a ‘blended environment’ – one in which agents are able to alternate between taking and making calls – can keep your team occupied for a much greater proportion of the working day.

That’s because, rather than sitting idle while they wait for the phone to ring, inbound agents can spend that downtime ringing customers and prospects. When an inbound call enters their queue, they’re able to revert to customer service mode.

In the past, technological constraints made it impossible for agents to work across both spaces concurrently. As a result, outbound and inbound contact centres were siloed affairs and agents were assigned to work in one or the other.

Now, it no longer has to be an either/or arrangement. Today’s feature-rich, user-friendly contact centre platforms can switch seamlessly between modes, routing both types of calls to agents, along with alerts about what’s coming down the line next.

Mixing it up

As well as keeping your agents busier, working in a blended environment may also keep them happier and, as a consequence, more inclined to remain with your organisation for longer. Employee churn is a perennial problem for the sector, with industry research released in 2019 revealing that Australian contact centres currently enjoy an attrition rate of 45 per cent. For agents, the average length of tenure is just 22 months.

Boredom can be part of the reason many decide to move on and understandably so. Answering the same types of questions and resolving the same set of issues eight hours a day – and, not infrequently, putting up with plenty of stick in the process – can take its toll on even the most resilient of individuals. Introducing a little variety to the job description may help stave off the ennui and encourage agents to stick around for a few more months, or even years. It’s good news for you if they do because improved staff retention can save your enterprise serious time and money on recruiting and training new people.

Maximising the return on your contact centre spend

In today’s times, the contact centre is likely to be the customer service ‘engine room’ of your organisation. It may also be the chief means by which you generate new business and retain existing accounts. Implementing a blended environment means your agents can be working hard on both remits; helping you contain costs and optimise productivity at a time when doing so has never been more important.

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