Metrics are a great tool for assessing contact center performance. But quality and customer satisfaction scores only tell part of the whole story.

If your agents aren’t hitting their benchmarks, it’s time to evaluate your call handling processes—and you don’t need metrics to do it. Just take a stroll through your contact center floor and check out your agents’ desktops. What do you see?

Desks laden with sticky notes, large knowledge bases, binders, and agents with one foot out of the door—are all red flags of complicated processes that prevent your agents from consistently and accurately resolving customer issues.

Here are four solutions to simplify your call handling process and optimize your contact center performance.

Simple Processes

Your agents have a challenging and stressful job—and complicated call handling processes only make it worse. Agents who are busy memorizing dozens of call types, scanning and interpreting extensive knowledge bases, or worrying about making a mistake are too busy to focus on your callers.

By implementing a technology solution that creates clear, easy-to-follow processes that guide your agents through every step of the call, you can get rid of desktop clutter (see you later, sticky notes!), eliminate guesswork, and free up your agents to deliver great customer service.

Implement the Right Technology, Not More Technology

There’s often a belief that giving your agents more technology tools will result in better customer service. But this isn’t always the case.

Don’t waste your precious budget on more technology that only further complicates agent processes. And forget adding on to legacy systems that no longer serve your set processes. You need a technology solution that improves your customer experience by simplifying and streamlining the agent experience.

By providing agents with step-by-step guidance and automation, memorization isn’t required and workflows are updated regularly to reflect process changes—allowing agents to focus on utilizing their soft skills that humans are good at and technology is not.

To Get a Different Outcome, You Need a Different Approach

Remember the old adage, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”? Well, that isn’t applicable in today’s ever-changing business atmosphere. Just as we often cling to legacy technology to ensure smooth delivery of great customer service, we tend to hold on tight to old processes creating massive process debt and unnecessary work for agents.

As your business grows and evolves, so should the way your agents deliver excellent customer service. It can never hurt to see the signs of where the process is broken, wipe the slate clean, and create new approaches with the right technology to cut down on tech clutter and out-of-date processes.

Put the Right Answers at Agent’s Fingertips

Implement processes that give your agents answers with the click of a button. This means agents spend less time searching, reading, and interpreting information for their customers.

Ensuring that information is available at their fingertips will also allow your agents to handle more complicated calls leading, to less possibility of excessive hold times and escalation to other departments or to contact center floor managers.

Excellent customer service and a thriving contact center is really about creating clear, straightforward, and unified processes for your agents to follow on every call.

Get rid of the sticky notes, binders, extensive knowledge bases, and excess technology. And give your agents the right technology that aids in guiding clear processes and ensures that agents feel confident, informed, and stress-free for every customer interaction.

Processes that enable agents to feel effective, efficient, and confident will result in happier and satisfied customers.