Tag Archives: Management

Increase Your Contact Center Agent Efficiency

Break the 80/20 Rule to Scripting

The Pareto Principle

As with many things in life, the Pareto Principle, named after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, applies to contact center efficiencies, too. And in a call center, it might mean that the 20% of calls that go off script require 80% of the time agents spend on the phone.

We also see it in the inverse relationship between call scripting and agent institutional knowledge.

You’re Not Alone

For most contact centers, efforts to manage this 80% usually go one of two ways. Leaders are faced with the problem of increased call volumes while trying to reduce call times. And many aim to streamline processes by making their scripts overly simple, leaving out crucial information that might be needed to complete a customer’s request or appropriately triage.

When this occurs, sales and service representatives have to improvise and use excuses such as, “Sorry, my system is running slow,” while they navigate their way to the tool that can help them help you. In even more frustrating scenarios agents can end up giving incorrect answers to specific questions or even immediately send the caller to 2nd tier support too early in the conversation.

Others make workflows so complex and rigid, that it can be a challenge for agents to grow comfortable and gain the knowledge required to be successful.

Simplifying scripting increases the training time required to establish institutional knowledge. But attempting to anticipate everything risks overwhelming new agents. Neither of these options serve the objective of increasing productivity, reducing handle times, and making training and coaching more efficient.

If this sounds relatable, you’re not alone. Businesses are constantly trying to solve this problem and get time back. Tools and trainings are offered constantly to help develop more robust documentation and agile scripts. But what if it’s easier than that?

Don’t Let Process Disrupt The Conversation

What would it look like for an organization like yours to rethink their agent desktop—to mitigate redundant conversations and duplicated efforts and reduce the volume of paper all over an agent’s cube? It shouldn’t feel impossible to make onboarding efficient or streamline your various systems and technology.

The 80/20 rule originated as a commentary on the distribution of wealth and became an essential business philosophy, informing the way we run our organizations and manage our teams. But it certainly isn’t the law. You don’t have to resign yourself or your team to long calls and inadequate scripts.

Think about what it means to break that rule. Perhaps you need to automate more of your process. Or maybe the key is in developing new ways to put knowledge at your agents’ fingertips. Whatever it is, implementing it successfully could optimize both scripting and training in the process.

What steps can you take to centralize your processes and ensure your agents are handling calls the right way, every time?

Cue® provides a simple agent desktop that streamlines workflow and enables phone-based agents to complete all functions of their job in one place, instead of having to navigate between multiple systems. With Cue®, agents can better assist customers, streamline training, reduce talk time, and eliminate after-call work—all with the confidence that they possess the right tools to engage every person they speak to. 

Strengthen Your Customer Success Team

For many businesses, customer-facing teams are essential to their success and customer retention. In fact, federal research estimates that customer contact centers will add the most customer service representatives between 2016 and 2026—projecting 36% growth.

And as your company grows, it may become clear that a new or bigger team is needed to focus on customer success. This team is on the frontlines helping your customers achieve their goals. Tasked with providing resources and support, a customer success team is the first indication of an organization’s reliability. Simply put, it’s their job to keep customers happy.

As you think about customer retention—and the essential functions of your customer success team—here are a few steps you can take to build a strong team:

Talk to Your Customers

This one might seem obvious, but the first thing your team can do is connect with the customers that have already given you feedback. Reach out to the ones that have reported success as well as the ones that have canceled or given negative input. Learn why they’ve given this feedback, positive or negative. Do you notice any trends? Take the feedback and strategize how to meet pain points and facilitate more positive experiences with your product or service.

Develop an Onboarding Process

You’re an expert in your product, and you’ve built it in a way that your customers will find easy to use. But even the most straightforward tools and services can benefit from a defined and effective onboarding process. Your customer success team can proactively engage and teach your customers the most effective way to use your products.This saves your customers time as they’re able to avoid common roadblocks. And it strengthens your relationship with them in the early stages of their customer journey.

Provide Self-Service Resources

Sometimes your customers don’t have the time or margin to get on a phone call. Creating a searchable FAQ or knowledge base can help provide these resources. Equip your success team with the answers to commonly asked questions for their customer interactions, but also create resources for common roadblocks, like how-to articles, webinars, or video guides.

Use Surveys

As your business grows, surveys are a sustainable and scalable mechanism for determining customer satisfaction and getting feedback. Many organizations use a Net Promoter Score® (NPS), but you can also add in surveys to other parts of the customer lifecycle. You might consider a survey after onboarding and or at the point of cancellation, for example. If and when cancellations happen, information is your most important asset. Understanding their needs and experience will help strengthen your customer success team and hopefully improve retention moving forward. Just keep in mind that customers can be deterred by too much communication, too—don’t overdo it!

As your customer success team grows and evolves, you may find your team collaborating with other departments, implementing new feedback tools, and coming up with new ways to measure your team’s success and metrics.

Get more visibility, build a stronger success team, and increase retention with Cue. Sign up for your free trial today!

Net Promoter, Net Promoter System, Net Promoter Score, NPS and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Fred Reichheld and Satmetrix Systems, Inc.

3 Tips For Sales Coaching Success

Sales coaching is an art and a science. And it’s a key component to effective sales management. In fact, today’s sales leaders count coaching as one of their top priorities at work, investing more time and effort now than ever before. Yet not all salespeople who get coached—even by the best coaches—do better.

Keep these tips in mind to help your teams get results:

FOCUS ON THE MIDDLE

Leaders often prioritize the top and bottom performers on their teams. They want the lowest performers to meet their quotas, and they want to help the best reps keep doing what they’re doing. But what about the middle?

Sales Executive Council leaders and authors of The Challenger Sale, Matthew Dixon and Brent Adams, explored how sales reps performed and how often they met their targets—from the highest performers to the lowest. They found that coaching didn’t make as significant an impact with the weakest or strongest performers. Instead, with the right tools, average-performing reps made the most progress—successfully delivering a buying experience that led to growth and customer loyalty.

When all is said and done, who you coach matters just as much as how you coach.  

REWARDS AND INCENTIVES WORK—IF THEY’RE EFFECTIVE

Sales contests, incentives, and individual prizes work when they’re changing behaviors, not reinforcing existing ones.  It isn’t as helpful to just offer cash to the first rep that makes a sale that day.

Are there things that your sales team is doing that you’d like them to stop? Or things they aren’t doing that you’d like them to? Design your contests and personal rewards around those actions. It might look like extra incentives for team members who hit a target number of sales for a specific product or working with an individual rep to identify opportunities for improvement and rewards for that improvement.

If you’re not sure what to offer as a prize, learn what motivates your team members. Don’t be afraid to ask them directly.

LEARN WHAT DRIVES YOUR TEAM

Each person on your team is unique. And programs like rewards and incentives work best when you understand what each salesperson’s drivers are. Yes, most of them are motivated by making money, but their goals for that money are probably different. Someone might be saving for a wedding, another might be paying off student loans. And some of your reps probably work in sales because they are self-motivated and enjoy the autonomy.

Take the time to get to know your team. Learn what their priorities are in their personal and professional lives. Ask them about their short and long term goals, how they get and stay motivated, and discuss what steps to take if they don’t seem motivated—for both you and the individual rep. These insights will help you understand how to coach each individual effectively, as well as help you get a better view of your team as a whole.

And in these conversations, tell your team members how they’re contributing to the company’s success. Give them more than financial goals, setting targets that help them feel fulfilled in ways that aren’t just monetary. Help them think beyond quotas and selling specific amounts. Instead, identify what matters to them—is it breaking a company record? Or selling in a specific market/industry?

Revamping your coaching strategy? Better conversations start with Cue. Try it today!