Call Center and CRM Best Practices

Retaining and growing a base of satisfied customers is the name of the game. In today’s global internet-based marketplace, customers have very high expectations and can find their next vendor with just a few mouse clicks. The challenge for modern contact center managers and supervisors is in determining how to identify customer satisfaction deficiencies and provide agent targeted coaching to improve on those deficiencies.

There are a number of best practices that should be deployed to maximize coaching effectiveness which will lead to increased customer satisfaction:

1) Establish a technology framework for doing agent level customer satisfaction analysis.  This framework would include 100% Call Recording, Post Call Survey, Speech Analytics.  The combination enables you to effectively monitor agent performance
2) Modifying your quality assurance review forms to gain greater insights into your customer’s thoughts. Some items to include on the form are polling questions
3) Perform a dissatisfied customer analysis to identify sources of customer frustration.  Periodic Analysis or ‘Deep Dives’ help to discover focus areas to improve customer experience and satisfaction
4) Build a consistent coaching framework that insures coverage and follow-up. 
 •Agents need specifics both in terms of coaching and improvement planning
  –What was done well/poorly with examples (recordings linked to CSAT/QA)
  –What needs to be improved and by when
 • Agents need to be coached in a consistent timeframe and with consistent and tracked follow up (3-5 times per month)
5) Close the loop with example based eLearning to include:
 -Positive and Negative Examples which help drive effective agent learning
 -The ability to annotate recordings with commentary makes the lesson more meaningful
 -The ability to tie the examples back to CSAT surveys makes the lesson more customer relevant

In addition, online quizzes insure that the lessons are retained by the agent and provide feedback for further study. These examples use your call recording repository to deliver high impact results for agents

In an upcoming June 3rd webcast, Agent Coaching for Customer Satisfaction: Best Practices, Ralph Barletta, President and co-founder of Knoah Solutions, will discuss these best practices.