5 Key Components of Contact Center Performance
By the Contact Center - Center of Excellence Team
The Contact Center is often the first point of contact between organizations and customers. As such, Contact Center interactions have lasting impacts on customer experience. In order to improve the customer experience and ultimately the relationship with customers, many organizations look toward optimizing their Contact Center.
A Contact Center optimization strategy that focuses on increasing operational efficiency and customer experience can provide significant benefits to your organization. Furthermore, targeting the Contact Center needs of both your organization and customers can revitalize the role of the Center in driving your organization’s mission. Here are 5 key components to consider when building your Contact Center optimization strategy:
1. Strong Contact Center Governance
Establishing formal roles and responsibilities for Contact Center managers and stakeholders can ensure appropriate oversight and accountability of your operations and procedures. Having centralized decision-makers may also allow your organization to effectively manage Contact Center policies and procedures.
2. Robust Knowledge Management
Improving knowledge base oversight, management, and training can help your organization lay the groundwork for sustainable knowledge preservation, evolution, and appropriate usage. Having centralized governance and oversight for knowledge management can ensure that your organization maintains a reliable organization-wide knowledge base. This ultimately ensures that customers receive accurate and consistent information and experience across any channel.
3. Unified Policies and Standards
Standardizing organization-wide Contact Center operations and performance standards can allow your organization to set clear guidelines for operating procedures and service levels. Measurable performance standards can be used to drive continuous improvement of your organization’s service quality, consistency, and reliability in addition to customer satisfaction. For instance, service level agreements for various metrics, such as first call resolution rates and customer satisfaction scores, establish specific targets to highlight areas for improvement.
4. Robust Data Analytics
Instituting organization-wide data tracking, sharing, and analytics for customer interactions can inform strategies for continuous optimization of your organization’s services. Data analytics can improve transparency and facilitate data-driven decision-making by yielding insights that can be used to improve organizational efficiency and customer experience. For example, analyzing commonly asked questions can promote expansion of information offered through self-service channels or even highlight organization-level risks.
5. Best-in-Class Contact Center Technology
Adopting best-in-class and emerging technologies encourages innovation and increases employee productivity and customer satisfaction. Selecting a technology to support your agency’s goals, such as improving consistency in responses (knowledge base) or increasing employee efficiency (automation or interactive voice response), can enhance your mission delivery while catering to customer expectations for the Contact Center.
To learn more about our Contact Center offerings, contact us at connectcoe@gsa.gov.
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