Sally works in a large call centre and although her job is paid well, it is not really the career she envisaged although it is a good company to work for. Sally is one of the most experienced agents and whilst she would prefer to find a less stressful role, she desperately needs the money for her family and lifestyle. The second income has enabled Sally and husband Mark to buy a house in Nottingham and meet the demands of a young family. It is a large contact centre with over 800 agents, many more at peak. The work conditions are good with all the usual trappings of a large corporation: restaurant, gym, day nursery and the like.

Sally’s employer is passionate about customer service and treating its customers well, so she often attends education courses to ensure the customer journey and experience is enhanced through first rate call handling. The company continually monitors her work and regularly recommends ways to improve customer engagement.

Sally’s role is very challenging and stressful (as her friends would testify) and has changed significantly in recent  years as the organisation has modified its approach to customers. When Sally first started five years ago, everything was phone-based and life was comparatively easy. Her her calls were not monitored and there were bonuses for the number of calls handled in a week. Not any more.

Just like her home life, the job has moved on. The contact centre now fields many types of customer communication from calls to letters from emails to web chat. There are also text messages and IVR calls to attend to. Furthermore, calls are now pushed to Sally (no more picking a call from a queue) and she has no time to think between calls. When email or web chat volumes peak, they are pushed to Sally’s desk to be answered alongside her work on the phone.

Sally is no longer remunerated in the same way either. Targets are now set for number of calls answered at source and queries closed on the first call. The new approach also requires the promotion of offers and cross selling.No wonder there is such a large attrition rate in the contact centre.

How numero helps Sally

The key to supporting Sally is to ensure information is at her fingertips to allow all calls to be handled efficiently. Sally needs an intuitive, easy-to-use desktop application that presents ALL the information required to efficiently handle the customer. The last thing she needs is multiple applications, ‘Alt Tabbing’ between systems to find the right information, system delays and having to ask different departments for answers to product queries, stock availability or delivery information

Some ways the numero solutions help Sally include:

The numero solutions are designed and built to make Sally’s life as simple as possible. We expect Sally to spend all her time developing customer relationships and answering the inbound queries as effectively as possible. With numero, Sally does not waste time finding information to complete the call, email, web chat or letter. Instead, we serve and push information to her desktop dynamically.

We make it easy to answer the customer contact and immediately resolve the query first time by:

• Making the agent screen easy to use, easy to navigate and fast to respond
• Ensuring the screen is easy to read and intuitive to use
• Serving the contact information dynamically to the agent, eliminating the need to search for answers
• Ensuring the agent has ALL the right information available on the screen to make the right decision
• Providing facilities (such as dynamic credit and address checks, past order history, product information, outstanding order status) to help the agent with each individual call
• Guiding the agent through the enquiry process by automating the navigation through the screen(s) to match the enquiry type
• Helping the agent make informed decisions by performing background checks to ensure the agent is focused on the job in hand rather than being distracted by having to calculate values, check on valid options etc
• Prompting the agent to improve the customer’s journey, for example suggesting promotional offers and associated products linked to a purchase
• Serving information dynamically to the agent to help answer questions during the call (for example, pictures of the ordered product, available time slot for engineers etc)
• Helping close the contact and ensuring a satisfied customer by automatically sending confirmations of the contact for future reference (technical information, the web chat dialogue, the case reference number, the delivery date etc).