Expertflow

 “It is 6-7 times more expensive to gain a new customer than retain an existing one.” – Yankee Group 

“2/3 of customers leave a vendor because of inadequate customer care.” – Yankee Group 

“As a customer’s relationship with the company lengthens, profits rise. Companies can boost profits by almost 100% by retaining just 5% more of their customers.” - Frederick F. Reichheld and W. Earl Sasser, Jr., Harvard Business Review 

....customer care is therefore the most important driver for profitability in a retail environment.

• Not having to wait => A study by Merchants Limited 2000 shows that 80% of all callers hang up on a Callcenter if they are not answered within 60 seconds. A Contact Center will help you reduce waiting time by virtually pooling resources and capitalizing on the Erlang effect.

• Being served whenever you want. A Contact Center will help you increase service hours by virtually pooling resources. So in order to serve all your clients at 10PM, you will only need two or three agents instead of one agent in each branch office.

• Talk to the right person, who is competent, knows me and speaks my language. A Contact center will help you in this by identifying the customer based on his phone number, retrieving more customer information from your Customer Database or CRM and select the right agent using Skills based Routing.

• Having consistently good service. A Contact Center will help you to impose the same process and service level across your entire organization and will help you to monitor performance of individual branches using reports, statistics, voice/ screen recordings and other monitoring tools.

Erlang C 

Erlang C is a formula linking the average waiting times to the number of callcenter agents, and call volume, and the ABC of a callcenter supervisor.

It says that with the same voice traffic per agent (say an agent is talking 50 Minutes per hour), the time a caller has to wait in the queue decreases inversely proportional to the number of agents and the talking time. For example, if you only have one agent in one branch office that picks up calls, callers will for example wait 100 seconds. If you virtually group four agents from four branches, callers will only have to wait 25 seconds to get served, because the probability that an agent gets free is increased as you add agents. Every agent will still be talking 50 Minutes per hour, but the caller (your customer) will not have to wait any longer.

Here is a free Erlang calculater for Excel without warranty: erlang97.zip

Skills Based Routing

 Instead of having one agent dedicated to one language or one group only, you can use Skills based Routing. This will allow you to assign several Skills to an agent, effectively pooling resources and thus reducing waiting time and increasing productivity of your agents. Another positive effect of Skill Based Routing is that you can define at a very granular level what type of agents will best be able to pick up that particular call, thus increasing customer satisfaction.

 Integrating Back Office Tasks

The graphic below shows a typical call volume over the time in a callcenter. At certain moments, you have call peaks where your clients will have too long and regions of low volumes where you pay agents for not doing anything.

In the low volumes, you can use Darondo Media Routing to distribute backoffice Tasks and Workflows to Agents. These can be:

• Tickets,
• Actions,
• Voicemails,
• Fax, 
• Emails and other activities.

In call peak situations where you have a high call volume, you can use Voice Self-Services more extensively.