Orlando, FL–“Most common cost-cutting measures in the contact center are a bad idea,” said Penny Reynolds, founding partner of Nashville-based The Call Center School, during the National Conference on Operations and Fulfillment held here April 14-16.
Take instituting a hiring freeze in your call center. On the surface, Reynolds said, a hiring freeze may seem like a good way to cut costs. But in reality, your costs would increase: The remaining employees would spend more time fielding angry calls from callers on hold, which in turn would lead to more costly telephone bills from your provider.
Instead of laying off staff or implementing a hiring freeze, Reynolds advised adding a self-service option to your interactive voice response (IVR) system, such as a prompt for catalog requests.
Reynolds also suggested adjusting the ring delay in your automatic call distributor (ACD). Let’s say your delay on your incoming calls is 30 seconds. Three options, according to Reynolds, are to answer the call immediately; adjust your ACD to have the call ring three times before going into a queue for 12 seconds; or letting the call ring five times and have no queue at all. By adopting the last option in lieu of the second, you’re “changing the caller’s perception about the call wait time, [so] the caller is less likely to hang up,” Reynolds explained. As an added benefit, you pay the telephone company only for the time you’re actually talking to the customer, “so the rings are free.”