How to Optimize Contact Center Performance

Rob Oscanyan

One of the most effective ways to increase customer loyalty and boost sales is to level up your customer support strategy. You want your customers to feel valued and to get value from every interaction they have with your organization.

The key to making this happen is to build a high-performance contact center. The contact center is the hub of your customer support efforts, so, as a contact center manager, you want to make sure everything — from your processes to your reporting —is working toward the goal of exceptional customer experience.

Read on to find out what managers can do to boost performance in our complete guide to contact center performance management.

What Is Contact Center Performance Management?

Managing contact center performance revolves around two things: information and communication.

Why Is a High-Performing Contact Center Important?

When you make resolving issues feel effortless for your customers and help them derive value from your product or service, you’re leveraging your customer support strategy to offer what Gartner calls “value enhancement.”

Doing this can lead to economic benefits for your organization. For example, Gartner has found that the probability that customers will stay with a company is 82% when customer support reaches the value-enhancement level, compared to 61% for a low-effort resolution and 37% for a high-effort resolution.

Additionally, research by PwC reveals that U.S. consumers will pay 16% more for products if they are getting a good customer experience. On the other hand, 32% will stop doing business with a brand they loved after one bad experience.

Your contact center is the heart of your customer service efforts. It’s what you use to interact with customers, solve their problems and ensure they feel supported. So, you want performance to be as high as possible so your company can reap the rewards of high customer loyalty.

How to Optimize Contact Center Performance

To increase performance and empower your agents, contact center managers can follow these 3 steps:

Here are some of the most useful contact center metrics you might want to use to help you understand performance:

If your contact center software uses artificial intelligence, you can dig even deeper into customer experience.

AI interaction analysis will evaluate every call transcription to track the sentiment of the conversations between customers and agents. When you can see which conversations are positive, negative or neutral, you can identify which agents are delivering a good experience and which ones might need more training and guidance.

Once you know what metrics you’re looking at, you can establish your baseline numbers. Then it’s time to start goal setting and strategizing.

As you look at your reporting data, you might find that your contact center is over or understaffed. If it’s overstaffed, not only are you losing money, but your agents might feel disengaged at work. Even more problematic, if it’s understaffed, your customers could be waiting too long, and your agents are likely stressed.

Look at metrics like average handle time, average wait time and the number of calls in each time interval to understand how well your agents are handling current call volumes. If there’s a problem that can’t be fixed with a reasonable increase in productivity, consider hiring more agents so you’re properly staffed.

The Best Software for Contact Center Management

When you have the contact center analytics and reporting you need to track performance, set goals and ensure you have the right number of agents on each day, you can operate a high-performing contact center.

If your current software isn’t delivering the insights you need, check out Intermedia Contact Center. With built-in reports for agent performance, queue performance and service quality, as well as customer reports and AI analytics that reveal call sentiment, you have all the data you need to optimize your contact center and deliver a superior experience with every interaction.

Intermedia Contact Center also integrates with your other communication and business apps, helping your agents be even more successful. Learn more about how a powerful, affordable contact center can help your business.

Rob Oscanyan is director for Product Marketing for Contact Center as a Service at Intermedia.

This guest blog is part of a Channel Futures sponsorship.