It is no secret contact centers are under constant pressure to improve performance while reducing costs. A recent study by Bain & Company found that 86% of contact center leaders want to do that.
One of the ways they manage operations is to track agent time. However, as contact centers handle more off-phone work, it’s getting harder and harder for leadership to value agent productivity. That’s because non-call work can be incredibly difficult to track properly.
But how can contact centers hope to achieve goals if they cannot track agent time accurately? They can’t.
Contact Centers are a dumping ground for off-phone work
Of course, a portion of agent off-phone work is simply handling call related work, and it’s not the type of off-phone work that is keeping contact center leaders up at night.
It’s that contact centers have become a dumping ground for manual work that other departments say they don’t have the resources to handle. These may include:
- Order entry/data entry
- Follow-up work
- Claims processing
- Customer deep dives
- Special projects
In some cases this new off-phone work can exceed 50% of contact center work. But because this work is atypical, contact centers can struggle to understand the effectiveness of what they are doing in these areas and how to measure efficiency. This is becoming a bigger issue as off-phone becomes a bigger part of contact center work.
What happens when you can’t account for non-call time
The obvious issue at hand is that if you can’t accurately track and value your agents’ time, you’ll never be able to optimize. A few things happen when you don’t have a clear picture of what your agents are doing, for how long, and what it’s worth:
- Staffing level misfires. Not having a clear picture of agent efficiency leads to over or understaffing your contact center.
- Agent dis-empowerment. You cannot identify who and what is working well and isn’t. As a result, your contact center will face higher turnover and lower customer satisfaction.
- False negatives. Without accurate measures of off-phone work, it will be easy for your contact centers work to be falsely undervalued. This can create a domino effect to underperformance.
The fantastic opportunity of properly tracking non-call time
The best approach to valuing contact center off-phone work is to start a manual count of work done by agent for specific work types. For example, count the number of orders entered by agents and then match those count with the amount of time agents are in the corresponding not ready work state.
Following this, you’ll want to begin generating a financial value for this work in order that the business units responsible for this new work are able to compensate contact centers with incremental budget dollars.
To reach this level of performance you should take a look at WiserOwl, and gaining the ability to see contact center operations at all levels and across all teams through a financial lens.
Go beyond traditional metrics, and continually manage the financial value of off-phone work
Too see the financial value of your contact center off-phone work, WiserOwl can provide a view of your operation without impacting data privacy issues, in 30 days or less. Don’t waste your next big decision!
