Call center optimization tips

Use a cloud contact center software for call center optimization

We use Amazon Connect Contact center software in our turnkey call center teams. Other really good options include Microsoft, Twilio, NICE, Bright Pattern, TalkDesk, RingCentral etc.

• Most businesses can save a bundle (sometimes, up to 80%) by moving their customer support to a cloud Contact Center. 
• Scaling up – You can support a lot more customers without having to hire additional staff. 
• Set up is a lot faster with cloud contact center without having to purchase hardware + licenses. Implementing an on-premise call center can take up to several months.
• Operational expenses increase, capital expenses reduce – Ongoing costs include a monthly subscription for cloud contact centers. Meanwhile, on premise contact centers require a larger up front investment.
• Full feature-set – Cloud contact centers have all the traditional features of an on premise contact center software. In addition, they have advanced technologies to feature live call monitoring, smart IVR, click-to-call, artificial intelligence, automated call summaries, integration with SMS, fax, email, social media and more.
• On-premise call centers have more stable technology to help eliminate call lag or lower call quality. However, cloud call centers offer a lot more integrations with systems, plus can have high call quality at strong, reliable internet connections.

Optimize self service by connecting to your CRM / internal systems

Harvard Business Review found that 88% of U.S. customers expect organizations to offer a self-service support portal. Higher self service equals higher customer satisfaction, reduced staffing requirements. It might also reduce your telephony costs.

Self service would not bring the intended value if your customers always end up choosing the “connect to an agent” option. The only way to avoid this is to integrate your self service portal to your internal systems / CRM / EMR etc.

Here are the benefits of integrating your contact center software with various systems.

1. You can avoid / reduce SPAM calls that waste 5-10 seconds per agent per call. To achieve this, you can integrate your call center software with your own or 3rd party identity systems. This will allow your call center software to assign a “nuisance score” to each incoming caller phone number – thereby dropping the call and saving you on telephony costs as well.
2. You can personalize each customer’s experience by appending the caller’s identity to incoming calls. For each incoming call, do a data dip into your backend system to suggest caller identity. In case of calls from numbers that are not in your CRM system, you can leverage 3rd party identity APIs to identify the caller’s name/location etc. Thereafter, you can use this information for identifying fraudulent behavior or to reduce the amount of information your “new customer” has to provide you. 
3. When a caller calls in, you can also deduce the intent of the call. E.g. callers with existing appointments call to either find out more about their appointment or to make changes to their appointments. Or the customer calls in to check the order status, claim status etc. Based on the caller’s upcoming appointments, you can offer them options to confirm their appointment, learn about their appointment, reschedule their appointment etc or speak to an agent to cancel their appointment. You can also check the progress of their customer intake and have them finish the rest of the intake process. You could offer them incentives, or wish them holiday greetings. There are no limits to what you can achieve in personalizing your patient’s experience.
4. Offering knowledge base leveraged information to callers / customers can contribute significantly to self service as well. Whether your customer is connecting with you via messaging or voice, you can use the Natural-Language Processing (e.g Amazon Comprehend) along with the above mentioned tools to deduce the “intent” of the customer interaction. When you tie in your call center software to your internal knowledge base system (e.g. Amazon Connect Wisdom), this allows you to offer even higher levels of self service to your customers.
5. Providing visual IVR to your customers allows you to further reduce the caller’s need to “speak to an agent”. “Phone only” self service IVRs can only go so far as they are driven by keying in digits via your mobile phone or desk phone. It is possible to do better than this with visual IVRs, therefore reducing average call handling time by a minimum of 45-60 seconds. You can introduce this option of self service in the IVR and allow the caller/customer to get an SMS or email to continue this self service via the visual IVR web link.
6. Use customer profiles or a CRM to equip contact center agents with a 360 degree / unified view of a customer’s profile with the most up to date information. This helps call center agents provide more personalized customer service. Amazon Connect Customer Profiles allows you to do this. You can also tie in your own CRM to achieve something similar to this.

Call center optimization for agent productivity

Here are tips to reduce call center costs w.r.t after call work

1. Use AI in your contact center software (e.g. Amazon Connect Contact Lens). You can alleviate some of the tedious work of disposing of calls. This way, you can automatically categorize contacts based on words uttered during the call. 
2. Create call summaries automatically by using the same AI tools. This way, your call center agents do not spend time and energy in summarizing each and every call.  Amazon Connect Contact Lens uses ML for call summarization. This also automatically identifies key parts of the customer conversation, assigns tags to each call / parts of the conversation.
3. AI and Machine Learning (ML) can also automatically identify post call task creation on your behalf. This way your agents do not have to waste time by manually creating follow up tasks / work for each call. 
4. Use a CRM to ensure that your call center agents have a much better view of the customer and their past interactions with your brand. We use Amazon Connect Customer Profiles for this. Make sure that your agents can see a combination of  contact history information (e.g. number of holds, call transcripts, customer sentiment, messaging history, case history etc.). This should also tie in with customer information such as phone number, address, and last or current order status from your internal applications.

Call center optimization for outbound

Outbound calls (e.g. for telemarketing or otherwise) takes up a lot of resources (time and expenses). Most advanced call center companies use dialers to reduce the overheads.

Here are call center optimization tips for outbound calls.

1. Use a dialer software – this can be a progressive dialer or a predictive dialer (whichever you are comfortable with). We use Amazon Connect Outbound Campaigns for this. 
2. For some of our customers, we use a progressive dialer. This simply autodials numbers on behalf of our agents. We use this for automated appointment reminders, follow-up calls for customer no-shows, calls to schedule appointments with no show customers or customers that canceled their appointments or patients that have fallen out of care, a first-time contact initiated from an online one-click call button or “contact us form”, or our community outreach cold calls as well.
3. For some other customers (telemarketing and lead generation), we use predictive dialers. This increases our call center agents’ productivity because they don’t wait for a successful connection. Amazon Connect’s ML-powered answering machine and human voice detection helps us ensure that we spend time only on live calls.
4. Leverage answering machine detection (AMD). We use Amazon Connect’s machine learning powered AMD. This way, we can decide whether we stop the call upon detecting an answering machine or if we continue leaving a voicemail.
5. TCPA compliance is important – specially for outbound call center campaigns. We leverage Amazon Connect Outbound Campaigns for this. It allows us to check (in real time) TCPA regulations for time of day controls, time zone related controls, the max number of attempts we are allowed per contact, and time required to connect to an available agent once the customer picks up the phone.
6. Leverage autodialing numbers, push 1 to talk to the agent. This allows you to use natural speech for personalized voice notes to be delivered to your customers (e.g. appointment reminders) in addition to giving your customers a choice to contact an agent for further assistance.
7. Many call center software provide you the ability to provision and de-provision phone numbers on demand. Leverage this for dynamically setting outbound numbers in your call center. Customers tend to pick up calls from local numbers more than inbound calls from toll free numbers and from out of state numbers.
8. Outbound campaigns often contain texting, emailing, calling – 3 different channels (to say the least). Leverage your call center software’s capabilities to combine cross-channel voice, SMS, and email communications. We use Amazon Connect outbound campaigns for this.