How Intelligent Routing can Reduce Cost

How intelligent routing can reduce cost Blog from JawadAbid.com
How intelligent routing can reduce cost – Group Discussion

In my previous article Fantastic Four to Improve Customer Satisfaction, I wrote about improving Customer services with blend of Four major ideas.

In this article, I will talk about, How to Reduce Cost through Intelligent allocation of work or intelligent Routing. There’s one big factor that does not given consideration the most yet. That is the Last minute work distribution or Last minute Routing factor. Even in our daily lives, if you get a task out of the blue, or at the eleventh hour, it is considered as not the best way to handle it for both sides.

Scenario in Contact Centers

In enterprises or contact centers, where per resource has to deal with about more than 100 tasks or calls in one shift. You ensure that they are not given calls or tasks when they are about to leave the shift. They may be going to their scheduled breaks. For instance, when you send call or Task to your employee right thirty seconds before scheduled scheduled break. The customer is likely not get great or satisfied customer service as employee is in a hurry. In their state of mind, they would like to wrap it up as soon as possible. Whereas the focus should be for first call resolution, and quick turn-around. It depends on key performance indicator such as up-selling. They will hesitate to go either extra mile to maintain great Customer Experience.

How to Enable intelligence in Routing

To ensure you’re sending calls or interaction or tasks with consideration of employee schedule, you need an intelligent Routing Engine. That Routing to have strong Integration between Automatic call distributor (ACD) and Workforce Management Platform (WFM).

The key here is that your organization or contact center work distribution or Contact Routing solution should optimize best resource available with consideration of resource schedules which are created based on forecast.

How it helps reduce Cost

With such insights, your routing engine will automatically adjust routing calls or interaction to employee. Especially those who just came on shift as opposed to sending it to someone about to leave with customized thresholds. For instance, Based on service level or any other key performance indicator.

Insights into workforce schedules gives routing engine to intelligently distribute workload through customized business objectives to your needs.

This way you have employee leaving on time and can be replaced with next resource efficiently. At the same time it avoids cost of unnecessary adjustments on overtime and employee retention. Further, it improves your first call resolution which is imperative in excellent customer satisfaction, hence reduces cost of multiple calls for the same concern.

Complex schedules and last minute changes impacts Employee engagement. Therefore, this further becomes critical element for seamless customer experience and First call resolution.

Example of Intelligent Routing

As an example, you can set a routing rule that do not send calls with condition. For instance, if the agent is about to leave shift in less than (x) seconds, as your AHT or Average talk time is around in (x) minutes. The same is applied for scheduled breaks or scheduled huddles, coaching or meetings.

This may vary from the nature of line of business you’re currently working on and your Key Performance Indicators. It essentially improves FCR with right resource, which helps achieving Goals.

For more details, write me for any questions or suggestions. I look forward for feedback whether this can be one of unique and contributing factors to Improve Customer experience.

ABOUT AUTHOR:

Jawad Abid is multi-talented Business, Technology and Customer Service Professional with two decades of Experience. He worked with Large Telecoms, Banks & Outsource Service Providers, Startups and Fortune 500 companies in multiple Roles. He’s passionate about Gaining Knowledge on Technologies and How Technologies enable Businesses to Improve Lives. He Share Knowledge in the attempt of giving back to Community.

Check out his Blogs at Blogs Section

You can follow me on:
LinkedIn  at Jawad Abid
Twitter at Jawad Abid

Top Five Common Mistakes in Capacity Planning

Top five mistakes in Capacity Planning
Top five mistakes in Capacity Planning by JawadAbid.com

Capacity planning in Information and Communication Technology is the process of calculating IT infrastructure, software and communication systems production. It is Must need to meet by keeping multiple factors to get the work completed efficiently without any hiccups.

Effective handling of Capacity Planning helps achieve the Stability and Successful Service delivery of their systems.

It is recommended to have Capacity Analysis periodically to keep up to date System performance. However, there are number of flaws seen in it from time to time. That causes poor performance of systems and poor customer experience.

1) Platform Understanding

Before calculating Capacity for any Software or system you must know the resources in use. Those resources include Inputs, incoming, outgoing and type of requests with frequencies. Once who, what and how gets answered, then first step gets completed.

The other factor to consider is your service level factor. Service levels are calculated based on the service you’re providing in an agreeable time period or limits.

It has been observed many times that software or systems are deployed without calculating its load. As a result, it causes poor performances for end-users and customers, which is perfect recipe of poor customer experience.

In a contact center environment, if you have to calculate the load on ACD system then you take in account the Calls or contacts it gets on day to day basis, with duration in multiple interval base as a base report. On top of it you must forecast for next three to six months. Forecast Report may includes how much Call load and Seats are expected in particular time period.

Similarly on Software level, you analyze how much requests it gets from end-users. This includes clients on Application layer, engine layer and database layer (if any). It helps knowing what is optimum level to achieve. After initial understanding, you forecast the number of requests and expected output for forecast time period.

2) Accurate forecast

Quite often, accurately forecasting on platform gets missed which is another factor. This Forecast Report is built on many factors:

  • Based on current utilization of Software or Platform.
  • Current trends or new trend in market.
  • Factor to consider is the peak volume.

The Report on Capacity Forecasts becomes helpful through automated platforms. These reports are helpful to regularly review that Capacity is up to the mark.

There are often change requests on the systems, and teams planning on them, sometimes do not consider sizing effort from resource on System and workforce point of view.

Adding new calculation within the system or adding new promotion may or may not impact the Service delivery or service levels, which should be intelligently calculated.

3) Monitoring Platform

One of many mistakes, organizations make is not having an effective monitoring system. This must be in place to calculate load and peak values with some analysis. That insight provides IT to proactively prepare systems or software accordingly.

For instance, they may have monitoring system but it isn’t calculating everything from cradle to grave. One should make sure that monitoring system should be able to calculate and take into consideration all values. Having very basic monitoring solution cannot provide enough insight timely to support. It cannot save time for customers in the outage hours.

Better monitoring systems can provide Proactive handling of problems and can generate support tickets automatically. The automation from proactive APIs is helpful in automating your ticketing system.

Without having Monitoring system, you’re basically driving a car without knowing how much fuel or what speed you have.

4) Timely Reviews on Capacity

The last major factor is to Review the trends regularly. For instance, you should be able to review the trends from past months or year. This helps in considering forecasts in that Capacity Review. However, it may be monthly or quarterly, but has to happen. This is to ensure that systems are up to date and able to sustain for any new load.

One of the examples is the virus you get to know, and for that you have to apply patches in timely manner to ensure lesser damage.

The same way you have to make sure your system is running up to the mark and is ready for production for next three to six months.

If it’s a web application, you should be able to review:

+ How much load it had in last six months?
+ What was the response times on those?
+ How much downtime was on them?
+ Whether was it within service level or not?
+ Adding new physical site in next three months will add more human-resource, and will it impact?

5) Communication between stakeholders

Above all, the communication within the organization related to promotions, must be well shared, with System owners.

That way they can forecast the capacity needed, licenses needed or more specifications needed to cover the support and growth.

As IT is the driving factor in growth, they are second important team to know about the promotions to ensure that they are ready to support.

Many in sales and customer service do not consider seeking input from IT or engineering teams. Sometimes, they speak to them after they have made the plan. In some cases, after they plan launch which really is a worst way to start promotion or expect a better Service level.

All of the above five major steps if done right, can no longer cause System outages. Capacity planning help improve your customer experience, growth and employee experience.

ABOUT AUTHOR:

Jawad Abid is multi-talented Business, Technology and Customer Service Professional, with two decades of Experience. He worked with Large Telecoms, Banks & Outsource Service Providers, Startups and Fortune 500 companies in multiple Roles. He’s passionate about Gaining Knowledge on Technologies, How Technologies enable Businesses & Improve Lives, and Sharing Knowledge in the attempt of giving back to Community.

Check out his Blogs at Blogs Section

You can follow me on:
LinkedIn  at Jawad Abid
Twitter at Jawad Abid

Fantastic Four to Improve Customer Satisfaction

Blog on Fantastic Four to Improve Customer Satisfaction - Blog by JawadAbid.com

In today’s world, Business Process Outsourcing industry is flourishing with support from many large organizations. They are focused majorly on lowering Operating Cost. In many cases, Customer satisfaction becomes tough to sustain if they do not comply with Fantastic Four.

Right resource, with Right information, at Right time, using Right solutions.

Every organizations must focus on Fantastic Four which can be their driving force in the Customer Service Industry.

Most BPO Organizations, if not 80%, 60% of them are having following issues:

  • Ineligible cheap labor
  • Immature Open source solutions
  • Poorly designed Infrastructure
  • Poor attrition rate
  • Manual processes

Above all, dissatisfaction among employees experience, are unlikely going to Improve Businesses.

Right Resources

They are the ones who are vastly skilled, knowledgeable and experienced. Without them, indisputably organizations find it tough to keep customer satisfaction and service levels well under control. Above all, without right and skilled resources, first call resolution ratio becomes very low. Organizations must focus on retaining experienced resources with benefits. For instance retaining experienced resources for long term through improving Employee experience. As a result, these resources become real asset for the success.

Right Information

It is very important to Empower resources with Right Information during customer interaction. It helps to provide personalize interaction which adds value to pleasant customer experience. Therefore, unavailability of complete information causes unnecessary hold times. Furthermore, finding information through manual processes, adds delay in providing right answer. In conclusion, it gives a significant blow to your customer service. Knowing customer during the call and having history of previous calls or tickets help resource position organization much better.

Right Time 

It is when resource is able to give answers instantly and accurately. As soon as customer satisfaction is achieved, it allows resources to up-sell or cross-sell. However, without customer satisfaction or unhappy customer, it becomes difficult to increase customer loyalty or customer retention. Organizations must focus on information to be available instantly right from the moment you hear customer through the right set of processes and tools.

Right Solutions 

It means to have proven world-class, creative, robust and innovative solutions in place. It becomes difficult for organizations to improve customer satisfaction, improve first interaction resolution and able to make more sales, without right solutions. Market leaders with proven technologies understand what features are needed through their market research from over decades. Without the right features it becomes hard for customer service teams to utilize them effectively. For instance, Integrated Computer telephony interfaces and self-service cuts overhead cost compared to traditional PBX/hardware based platforms by miles.

Blog - Top Five Common Mistakes in Capacity Planning from jawadabid.com
ABOUT AUTHOR:

Jawad Abid is multi-talented Business, Technology and Customer Service Professional, with two decades of Experience. He worked with Large Telecoms, Banks & Outsource Service Providers, Startups and Fortune 500 companies in multiple Roles. He’s passionate about Gaining Knowledge on Technologies, How Technologies enable Businesses & Improve Lives, and Sharing Knowledge in the attempt of giving back to Community.

Check out his Blogs at Blogs Section

You can follow me on:
LinkedIn  at Jawad Abid
Twitter at Jawad Abid