Contact Center Rescue Series: Reducing Call Handle Times
Are you struggling to keep call handle times under control in your contact center? Long wait times and frustrated customers can lead to lost business and damage to your company's reputation.
Are you tired of hearing complaints from customers about long wait times on the phone? Are you losing business because of poor customer service? It's time to take action and find solutions to reduce call handle times.
You can improve customer service and retain customers by providing comprehensive training for representatives, streamlining systems and processes, increasing staffing levels, setting clear metrics and goals, and implementing intelligent call routing systems. Visit https://www.imadlodhi.com/subscribe to learn more about reducing call handle times and improving your management skills.
Overview:
In this guide, Imad Lodhi, a veteran with 24+ years of global expertise in the field of leadership, management, and contact centers, provides an in-depth analysis of the subject of call handle time in contact centers. He defines call handle time, explains its importance, and provides solutions for reducing it. By understanding the causes of both high and low call handle times, and implementing solutions such as training, system streamlining, and intelligent call routing, businesses can reduce wait times and improve customer service.
Introduction:
As customer demands become increasingly specific and complex, it is essential for businesses to be able to provide quickly executed solutions or risk losing those customers. Poor customer service is one of the leading causes of customer frustration and can have a detrimental effect on customer loyalty. To ensure that customers are satisfied with the level of service they receive, contact centers should strive to reduce call handle times and offer effective support in a timely manner. This will help build confidence with existing customers and create positive connections with potential ones.
Call handle time refers to the amount of time a customer service representative spends on the phone with a single customer. This includes not only the time spent addressing the customer's issue or question, but also any hold time.
When call handle times are too long, customers can become frustrated and may even take their business elsewhere. Additionally, long call handle times can lead to abandoned calls for those customers who are waiting and increased costs for your business, as representatives spend more time on each call and are unable to take on as many calls overall.
Problem Overview: The Problem of High Call Handle Times
High call handle times can be a major problem for contact centers, leading to frustrated customers and lost business. The causes of high call handle times can include inadequate training for customer service representatives, complicated or outdated systems and processes, insufficient staffing levels, a lack of clear metrics and goals for call handle times, and poorly designed call routing systems.
- Inadequate training for customer service representatives can lead to representatives not having the necessary skills and knowledge to handle customer interactions efficiently.
- Complicated or outdated systems and processes can lead to confusion and delays in addressing customer issues.
- Insufficient staffing levels can lead to a high volume of calls and long wait times for customers.
- A lack of clear metrics and goals for call handle times can make it difficult for managers to measure and improve performance.
- Poorly designed call routing systems can lead to calls being mishandled and customers being transferred multiple times.
The Problem of Low Call Handle Times
- Overly restrictive metrics and goals for call handle times
- A lack of empathy and personalization in customer interactions
- Insufficient time for representatives to fully address customer concerns
- An overreliance on automation and self-service options
- A lack of follow-up and follow-through on customer issues
Solution Overview: Solutions for Reducing High Call Handle Times
By understanding the causes of high call handle times, businesses can implement solutions to reduce them and improve customer service. These solutions can include providing comprehensive training for representatives, streamlining systems and processes, increasing staffing levels, setting clear metrics and goals, and implementing intelligent call routing systems.
- Providing comprehensive training for customer service representatives can improve their skills and knowledge, resulting in more efficient interactions with customers.
- Streamlining systems and processes can make them more efficient and user-friendly, reducing confusion and delays.
- Increasing staffing levels during peak periods or as needed can help ensure that customers receive prompt service.
- Setting clear and realistic metrics and goals for call handle times, and tracking progress regularly can help managers measure and improve performance.
- Implementing an intelligent call routing system that prioritizes high-priority calls and assigns them to the most appropriate representatives can ensure that calls are handled efficiently and effectively.
Sample List of Benefits of Improving The Call Handle Times:
- Reduce Wait Times in the Queue
- Reduce Abandonment Rates
- Improve Client Experience (CSAT/NPS)
- Minimize the number of service disruptions and calls to the service desk
- Improve Uptime and Availability of products and services
- Improved User productivity
- Address issues with repeat and chronic issues so repeat calls can be avoided
- Improve Response Times and Reduce MTTR
Sample List of Observations For Long Call Handle Time:
So what causes high Average Handle Times and how can you reduce it? For that, we will once again refer to our Operational Management Reference Framework.
Let's take a look at the Operational Management Reference Framework to see some of the elements that impact this issue:
- OM3 - Skills/Training Management. One way to reduce Call handle Times is to ensure the service desk agents are adequately trained and skilled.
- OM5 - Quality Management. In order to reduce Call Handle Times, you need to ensure that you have a Total Quality Management (TQM) team, what is reviewing calls and tickets to assess for quality and improve the AHT and overall client experience.
- OM6 - Knowledge Management. One way to reduce Call Handle Times is to ensure the service desk agents have an accurate knowledge base that is regularly maintained. Having readily available knowledge will allow the agents to resolve the issues much quicker, reduce the AHT, and get the calls in the queue.
- OM12 - Service Performance Management –Reporting & Measurements. The Reporting & Measurement Process plays a vital role in collecting data to track and trend performance so informed decisions can be made to improve call handling skills.
- OM13 - Service Performance Management – Analytics & Optimization. The Analytics & Optimization process is designed to harvest various datasets to gain insights into the historical call handling performance. The insights are used to develop foresight about how to improve the handle times.
- OM14 - Continual Service Improvement. The Continual Improvement process is to leverage the Reporting & Measurements, Quality Management,Knowledge Management, and Training Management processes to drive the Shift Left Strategy in the organization. The ultimate goal is to increase End User uptime and availability by driving issues towards End User Self Enablement, Automation, and Self-Healing.
- OM18 - Queue Management. The Queue Management process is to ensure that work coming to the operations team is managed and acted upon in a timely manner so as to avoid client delays and dissatisfaction.
- OM21 - Staff Utilization Management. The Staff Utilization Management process ensures that staff productivity is being measured and analyzed to ensure consistent performance across the organization.
- FLM1-FLM7 - First Line Management Systems. First-line managers are critical to the well-being of an organization, as they directly manage and have significant influence over employees who perform the day-to-day operational work. If the First-line managers don't demonstrate a robust management system that focuses on both short-term and long-term operational goals, they will not be able to enable an organization to focus on Its people, stabilize its operations, and drive continual improvement.
- UM1-GOV4 - Upline Management & Governance Systems. The up line management and governance systems established and executed by the senior leadership team are essential in ensuring that the day-to-day operations are aligned with the organization's strategic objectives. If they are not implemented, then the senior management team will not have the right level of focus to ensure compliance with departmental and organizational goals and risks will not be identified and mitigated.
- EE1-EE17 - Employee Engagement, Enablement, and Empowerment Systems. If Employee Experience (EX) isn't factored into any of the activities, you will not only struggle to sustain the improvements, but you may not even achieve the improvements.
A Real World Example:
Imagine you have a proposal to get out to a client and your email does not seem to be working. You reached out to others to see if they can send the email, but they are also having issues. You did basic troubleshooting such as restarting your computer, reseating the network cable, trying the computer on another network port, trying another email client, etc. But no luck.
You check the self-help portal and there are no messages indicating any issues. You decide to call the contact center, versus using the chat option, due to the urgency of the situation.
Imagine after waiting on the phone, for what seems like an eternity, you finally get to an agent. Although very frustrated, you are also anxious to resolve your problem.
You try to tell the agent the urgency of the matter and that there could be significant business impact if the deadline is not met.
What you hear back is the dreaded script.
The agent takes you through the standard questions to triage and understand the issue. Even though you shared many of the troubleshooting steps you had done and conclusions you have made. The agent still continues to ask his questions. Throughout this time period, you find that you are repeating yourself quite often.
Once the triaging questions are concluded. You assume a solution will be provided. However, you realize that, that assumption is incorrect.
Now the agent has to place you on hold as he researches his knowledgebase. After what seems to be a few mins of being on hold, he returns and walks you through very basic and preliminary troubleshooting steps to determine the root cause.
You realize the agent missed it when you indicated in the beginning that you had already tried these steps. After repeating them again with the agent, he places you on hold once again to research.
After several more attempts at troubleshooting and being placed on hold. He informs you that, he will need to pass the ticket to the Level 2 team to further look into the issue.
By this time, you have wasted 30-45 mins.
Although you remind him of the importance of getting the proposal out in a few hours, he tells you that the level 2 team will get back to you in approximately 8 business hours. You indicate to him that his is unacceptable and remind him that nearly everyone on your floor is having the same issue.
He places you on hold once again and finally comes back to tell you that there is a global email outage and nothing can be done. Internal and External teams are working on the issue and while there is an SLA of 1 hr, there is no guarantee.
You don't realize it, but the average handle time is approximately 9 mins on the phone and 2 mins of after call work to finish documentation.
Another thing you don't realize is that, the agent did not capture all the necessary information or captured some of the information incorrectly.
Although the agent still sent the ticket to Level 2, when they finally did get to your ticket, they realized that information is missing. Normally they would have sent the ticket back to the agent to get the necessary information, as they do not call clients directly. This could have taken a few days. However, in this case, you got lucky. Because there were hundreds of other people with the same issue, the other agents did capture the necessary information in their tickets.
I just listed some key areas where the call was not handled correctly. There have been calls where many more errors were made leading to significant call handle times.
On the flip side, you might also come across situations where the agent is under pressure to get you off the phone as quickly as possible because one of the things they are measured on is the Average Call Handle Time (AHT). Having high AHT is a no-no so agents and their management do whatever they can to end the call quickly. Even if it means "accidentally" disconnecting it.
Conclusion
Call handle time is a crucial metric for any contact center, as it directly impacts customer satisfaction and loyalty. By understanding the causes of both high and low call handle times, and implementing solutions such as training, system streamlining, and intelligent call routing, you can reduce wait times and improve customer service. Don't wait any longer to start seeing real results in your team and business. Visit Imad Lodhi's website today and start your journey, one step at a time. His guide offers a wealth of insights and tools to help you improve your management and leadership skills. If you're ready to take your management skills to the next level, visit Imad Lodhi's website and subscribe.
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