Call Center and CRM Best Practices

According to a new Knowlagent sponsored DMG white, a growing number of leading contact centers are putting their agents to work during idle time. They are using an emerging set of workflow-enabled applications to identify agent downtime and deliver work items and tasks to fill those idle periods. These emerging solutions are helping to speed up and reduce the cost of processing.

Most contact center agents know a great deal about what happens throughout their organization because of the training they receive and the inquiries they handle. The idea is to build on this knowledge by cross-training agents to handle work items that have traditionally been the responsibility of other groups or departments. Some of these work items are a logical extension of contact center responsibilities, such as the addition of new channels and outbound interactions. Others are outside of what has classically been considered the purview of contact centers, but are ideal for this type of short-term “fill-in” work.

 Ideal ‘fill-in’ work for contact center agents includes:

-Handling email
-Handling faxes
-Handling paper correspondence
-Handling media interactions
-Outbound surveys
-Outbound welcome calls
-Outbound account retention calls
-Application reciw an dpapproval
-Opening new accounts
-Purchase orders
-RMAs
-Accounts receivable

To read more about best practices for Idle time, download the white paper paper Using Agent Idle Time to Improve Enterprise Performance and Profitability