Escaping Telephone Limbo: How to Proactively Reduce Average Handle Times
Reducing average handle times is an effective and essential way to create a satisfactory customer service experience.
Quality customer service has become more than just a modern-day marketing buzz word. Establishing trust and communicating with your customers is an essential part of creating a satisfying customer experience, and it’s important to understand which aspects contribute most to customer satisfaction. In a consumer-driven, service-based business landscape, call centre hold times can literally make or break how the general public views your company. When over 60% of consumers still prefer to communicate with customer service representatives over the phone, it’s unacceptable that 75% of those consumers feel it takes too long to reach a live agent.
Effectively reducing your average handle times can not only positively influence your bottom line, but it can also grow invaluable goodwill with customers while organically contributing to your organization’s perceived professionalism and reliability. To help callers escape telephone limbo and spend as little time in your call centre queue as possible, auditing how yours operates and understanding what can be improved is a must.
Understaffed and Unqualified
Realizing you’re understaffed can often be the first step in turning around an ineffective call centre and reducing average handle times. Simply put, too few agents answering calls leads to customers in the queue waiting longer for service, and anxious consumers are quick to give up and hang up when they’re made to wait. If your current staff can’t handle the call volume, it could be time to bring in a few more call handling agents .
Additionally, putting an inexperienced and undertrained agent behind a phone is almost as bad as being understaffed. Proper training and agent competency is a must. The less time it takes for contact centre agents to communicate effectively while addressing customer concerns, the less time customers spend in the call centre queue waiting for assistance.
8 Tips to Help Reduce Average Handle Times
Fortunately, taking steps necessary to reduce average hold times doesn’t need to be difficult, and employing a handful of in-house tactics can noticeably affect contact centre communication.
1. Optimize automated call centre scripts and processes
Something as simple as improving an outdated call centre process or script can greatly impact productivity and efficiency. It’s common for organizations to regularly improve internal operations only to neglect ancient automated call centre processes and scripts. Audit your current procedures to optimize the user experience.
2. Utilize customer-focused marketing tools
Take advantage or modern customer-centered call centre hardware and software to give your customer support agents the tools needed to elevate their performance. As with standard operating procedures (SOP’s) and scripts, working with outdated tools is an unnecessary crutch that could be contributing to longer average handle times.
3. Record and play calls for training purposes
Record and play back calls for your support staff to illustrate proper technique, to correct inefficient dialogue, and to provide appropriate examples of both. Create operational goals to boost your business and work with customer support staff to achieve those goals.
4. Take advantage of performance reviews
Your customer support personnel know what’s working and what isn’t when it comes to quickly addressing caller concerns and consistently working through the contact centre queue. Regularly ask questions and provide answers that can improve the overall experience.
5. Eliminate cold transfers
Cold transfers fuelled by back-and-forth miscommunication kills customer confidence. Being passed around as a caller is frustrating, which is why it’s important to eliminate cold transfers whenever possible with a focused automated system and knowledgeable call centre staff. Reaching the right person the first time is vital to reducing average handle time.
6. Alleviate after-call work
The ability for customer support agents to move between calls smoothly and effectively can drastically improve productivity. The quicker an agent can complete important post-call work allows for extra time spent on the phone with more callers. Optimize after-call summary and clean-up work.
7. Include additional contact channels
Approximately 60% of customers situationally change their contact channel for customer service needs. Point callers to a comprehensive website for more information, introduce alternative ways to communicate (such as a customer service e-mail address or a social media page), and take advantage of a live chat support service if possible.
8. Staff and train appropriately
As already mentioned, undertrained and over-stressed contact centre staff negatively contribute to average handle times, and increasing staff numbers or introducing additional training where and when it’s necessary goes a long way.
Don’t Leave Them Hanging
If it’s not already clear, one of the biggest contributing factors to effectively reducing average handle times is the competency and size of your call centre staff. When equipped with intuitive automated procedure scripts, streamlined in-call instructions, and simplified after-call work, customer support personnel will find it less time consuming to address customer concerns. That means fewer callers spending time waiting in the customer service queue.
