Do More with Less in the Agent-Assisted Environment

This month, we’re exploring how to optimize resources and reduce costs. In the agent-assisted environment, this essentially equates to doing more with less by answering the phone more quickly and handling more calls. In almost 20 years consulting with both small and large contact centers, I’ve never had an executive tell me they have unlimited budget and resources, and over the past month, I’ve had more than a handful of conversations with our clients on this very topic; in fact, I had one this morning.  

Even though an agent-assisted interaction can account for 50% of overall satisfaction with a brand when someone has that interaction, it’s oftentimes the first place an organization looks to cut or hold the line on costs and budget even with a growing number of customers or contacts. How can organizations deal with this reality while maintaining or improving the customer experience?

Today, I want to explore one specific strategy: understanding your customers’ tolerance for waiting before speaking to a representative.

Do you know the wait time at which customer satisfaction drops significantly? Are you overstaffed at some time intervals and understaffed at others? Our research shows that customers that report ZERO wait time have the highest satisfaction scores, all things being equal, and that the biggest driver of satisfaction with the assisted experience is timeliness of resolution. Now if your resolution rates are low, especially first call resolution, you may not see very large differences in satisfaction by wait time as the satisfaction of your callers is already depressed. For some strategies to increase call resolution please see the January post How to Improve on the Highest Weighted Driver of Customer Satisfaction. But back to wait time.  

If you can identify how much satisfaction drops by each wait time bucket (0 Min, 1 min, 2 min, 3 min, etc.), and the distribution of your calls by these buckets of wait time, you can then plan your resources to minimize the most negative impacts of wait time to the customer experience. How? You will essentially move wait time up for some callers, but under the break point, allowing you to bring wait time down for others that are close or closer to the break point time.  

Executing this strategy will take some outside of the box thinking for many organizations, and you will need to have the appropriate Workforce Management Strategy and tools/technology in place. You will also likely need to leverage Split Shifts, Micro-Shifts, Casual Shifts, or a combination of these and other non-traditional shift patterns. If you are willing to pilot some of these strategies to get the right resources available at the right time, you will be better positioned to optimize your resources and the customer experience – the ultimate goal for most contact center leaders.  

If you’d like to connect to see how this and other optimization strategies can be put into practice, reach out to us today.

About the Author: Scott Killingsworth is Director of the Customer Service Advisory Practice at J.D. Power. He manages the Customer Service Certification programs and is responsible for developing and maintaining the standards and operational benchmarks for the program. 

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