How to optimize operations and achieve savings

Reduce the number of repeat calls

Repeat calls are the type of calls where customers mention that they have previously spoken to someone in the company about the same issue. On average, about 10% of all calls in Scandinavian customer centers are repeat calls.

Although your employees should try to resolve customers' problems during the first call, the vast majority of customers are generally patient. Therefore, customer satisfaction levels often remain unchanged during the first call back.

However, if the customer phones your contact center 3 times or more with the same problem, the likelihood of dissatisfaction doubles – regardless of whether the customer's problem is resolved both quickly and professionally during the last call.

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Minimize the call length

Call length is one of the parameters by which many customer service companies measure their own performance. And while a longer conversation is not necessarily a bad quality when dealing with complex queries, it can have a bad effect on customer satisfaction when dealing with simple requests.

For simple inquiries, a good rule of thumb is that your employees should strive not to have long conversations. Customer satisfaction in simple conversations drops by as much as 35% when the conversation is longer than 3 minutes.

To minimize the conversation time, your employees can therefore benefit from practicing how to handle the 10 most typical inquiries both quickly and efficiently.

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Reduce your employees' knowledge gaps

On average, employees lack knowledge in 12% of their conversations, and in knowledge-intensive industries it is as high as 35%.

Luckily, there are several ways to reduce your employees’ knowledge gaps. A quick win is to coach new employees more efficiently, as they often have significant knowledge gaps during the first 3 months. In general, you should get an overview of what problems each employee is struggling to solve. Based on these overviews, you can help them by providing access to concrete examples of good and efficient solutions or by continuously improving the systems they use for information retrieval.

Such measures can reduce the total conversation time by 10% in most departments.

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Optimize coaching and onboarding processes

One of the recurring themes in our analysis and advice is that you should continuously coach your employees so that their service level matches customer expectations. Therefore, employee coaching is also one of the most important focus points you should have when optimizing your operations.

The best results come when your employees learn from those with more experience – because as employees have different skill levels and areas of expertise, there is often a lot of knowledge to be gained. Capturi's research shows that employees who actively focus on copying the techniques of their peers can increase customer satisfaction by up to 50%.