How Telcos Can Maximise Call Centre Efficiency

UK telco call centres have a difficult job in enhancing customer experience. High call volumes, tight targets and a pressurised environment combine to make call centre efficiency one of the most difficult areas of a business to get right.

Fortunately there are cost-effective methods available that can help them improve.

The call centre landscape

Despite major innovations in the customer comms channels that telcos utilise in recent years, the number-one way that customers prefer to speak to telcos remains over the phone. Ofcom reveals phone calls make up more than three quarters of mobile customer contacts and nine in 10 landline and broadband contacts. While webchat is taking the edge off inbound calls, if a telco’s call centre has shortcomings, the vast majority of customers will at some point be affected.

But despite the importance of this key area of the business, the experience for customers is getting worse. The average time customers spent in a queue increased by 6% year on year. Only 53% of telco customers are satisfied with complaint handling for mobile, while 51% say the same for broadband.

The challenge

Why is it so difficult to maintain high service levels? Is it simply that customers are expecting more? Squeezed by increasing outgoings on all sides, are they more stressed, pressed for time and therefore more critical of any service providers? Is it that product service levels are generally getting worse, causing more inbound calls?

Or is it that the data available within telcos is simply not being utilised effectively in keeping up with business demands?

Maximising call centre efficiency with better data visibility

At miPerform, we believe it’s the latter. Telcos already have all the data they need to maximise their call centre efficiency, the trouble is that it is often not joined up. Metrics such as customer satisfaction, average handling times, individual employee performance and complaint details are often logged and kept up to date, but analysed separately, giving agents no complete picture of how they are performing.

We believe every telco can do better for their clients and for their employees and have set out to create a toolset that engages everybody in the team and ensures they are all working towards common business goals.

With the vision of creating a ‘Fitbit for business’, miPerform offers a dashboard that gamifies employee improvements on an individual level, helping them see their own personal performance, measured by the metrics that matter to the business. The result is that, for high-performing employees, this empowers them with all the knowledge they need of their performance on a daily basis – rather than waiting for the quarterly performance review.

The miPerform dashboard ensures that data is kept usable and actionable in the call centre. Employees are notified of exactly what is going well and what isn’t in real time, and leaders are given an understanding of the bigger picture and what support they need from other teams.

Going beyond the call centre

Our platform is already revolutionising telco customer service, and we are now expanding into other customer-facing areas. Our Chief Revenue Officer James Walker explains:

“We can now support the field service part of telco too. All of those fantastic engineers that are going out and supporting people every day – if we can provide the right toolset of engagement there, I think that’s a really interesting opportunity.”

As we develop a solution for this team too, the prediction is that there will be fewer inbound calls to contact centres in the first place, thereby maximising call centre efficiencies in a much broader way.

Data quality not quantity

Over the past two decades, businesses have been quick to arm themselves with vast quantities of data to stay ahead of their competitors and telcos are no exception. Now it is no longer about the quantity of data you have, but how accessible it is and how well understood it is by your team. miPerform is committed to solving this challenge within telcos and with it, streamlining operations all across the businesses that they work with.

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