Minimize contact center issues by increasing your visibility with proactive monitoring

Contact centers typically aim to handle as many calls as possible and resolve customer issues quickly while maintaining high customer experience (CX) standards. The contact center is a complex environment, and with many features and options available, there is always a risk of issues arising that can impact your customers’ experiences and your brand reputation.

When I call the support lines of any company, I want to be served quickly and efficiently – for me, a good call experience represents the brand.

If you are interested in learning more about what issues tend to arise and how to prevent them or fix them quickly – continue reading.

Most Common Issues

Having worked with many of our customers, I’ve noticed a few common issues that tend to pop up in call centers and impact the CX. Here’s a rundown of the four most common ones I’ve come across, along with some detail on each.

Technical issues – These can include problems with the telephony system, call routing, and other technology that supports your contact center. Apart from number operability, calls being routed incorrectly within the contact center can lead to longer wait times for your customers or agents being unable to handle the call.

Routing is often referred to as ACD – Automatic Calls Distribution and examples of traditional Call Routing Strategies includes: ACD-Based Routing, Skill-Based Routing or Priority-Based Routing. However, these can malfunction at times.

Imagine a scenario where a customer dials your support number, selects a routing option to be connected to the German sales department, and waits for an available agent, but due to a routing issue the call rings out without connecting to an agent. This leaves your customer frustrated and they will need to call again…

Network issues and agent availability – Network issues such as latency, jitter, and packet loss can cause audio quality issues that affect your agent’s ability to hold a conversation with the customer or vice versa. This often leads to the query not being resolved and the customer potentially terminating the call due to the bad experience.

Agents may also be unavailable to answer calls due to absence, system issues, or other factors, which have become even more widespread since the remote working model became a reality.

This can have a huge impact on your CX – calls need to be answered and handled promptly – reacting swiftly to customer inquiries is vital. 

System overload and IVR Issues – A high volume of calls can overload the system, causing delays or even dropped calls. The same can happen with Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems. They can fail or become overloaded, leading to customer frustration and longer wait times. If such an issue occurs it is important to play an emergency message to inform your customer of the issue.

“Whisper Announcement” issues – Whisper Announcements are brief messages played to your agents just before they connect with a caller. Whisper Announcements provide agents with critical information about the caller, allowing them to prepare adequately for the call. However, when the whisper prompt occasionally fails to play, it can result in confusion and delays on the agent’s side, which ultimately affects your customer’s experience and the overall call flow.

Proactive Monitoring

I know for a fact that without proactive testing and monitoring, all these issues can and often will go unnoticed, resulting in decreased performance and reduced customer satisfaction.

This is why it’s crucial to have a robust monitoring system in place that can promptly detect and address such issues. Additionally, it’s important to keep in mind that the monitoring system should allow you to test the customer experience, which will help you understand the behavior from your customer’s perspective.

To achieve a seamless customer experience and improve overall performance, proactive testing of your contact center phone numbers, agent behavior, and contact center features, such as IVR performance or Whisper Announcements, is necessary. This will give you visibility and will ensure that everything functions correctly without any disruptions to your customer experience. 

Bigger picture

Ongoing monitoring not only provides you with enhanced visibility and helps you to detect issues before they impact your customers. It also allows you to build the bigger picture of your call center’s performance.

To ensure that all partners are performing to the highest standard, call centers with multiple locations or outsourced services can benefit from using external monitoring tools. While regular KPI metric reports can provide some insight; external monitoring tools allow for the comprehensive monitoring of all contact centers to gather data and compare the results. This approach can help with detecting patterns or opportunities to streamline operations. With this information, you can make data-driven decisions to improve overall performance, leading to increased efficiency, higher customer satisfaction, and better business outcomes.

Our Solution

We offer a unique solution to help businesses verify the response time of their agents and other important call metrics.

With the Spearline Agent Response test, you can schedule proactive testing during the times, and at a frequency you need to ensure that your customer support lines are open and working, and that callers are successfully reaching your agents.

Our solution is designed to measure the connection and agent response time and provide recordings for each test call. It is a true replication of the customer path, dialing from our in-country lines located around the globe.

You can easily determine whether the call was successful or not and spot any trends where calls may be timing out instead of being answered. Along with this, all vital telecom metrics: including connection, PDD and DTMF functionality are provided instantly on our Testing Management Platform.

Stay on top of contact center performance by testing, benchmarking, and managing both in-house and outsourced teams and identifying potential issues before they have a chance to impact your customers with the Agent Response Test. Establish benchmarks, and manage the performance of your outsourced contact center teams and sites. Additionally, ensure accurate measurement of service level agreements (SLAs) and hold your providers accountable.

We believe in helping businesses improve their customer support experiences by identifying bottlenecks and inefficiencies in their call routing and resolution processes. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you improve your customer satisfaction rates!