How To Stress Test Your Contact Center

Contact centers are the heart of a business. And when the rhythms of a contact or call center are even slightly off, it can be an early sign of upcoming trouble. Diagnosing your contact center’s health is easy with ongoing report monitoring.

Dozens of real-time and historical reports in ShoreTel Enterprise Contact Center show what’s working and what needs to be improved. Start digging into the stats and analysis in these reports and take the guesswork out of understanding what your customers are saying, how well campaigns are performing and which agents know their stuff.

ShoreTel reports cover a gamut of information about callers, trunks, groups and agent activities. Real-time information about call-abandon rates or low traffic reveals current, in-the-moment happenings in the contact center.

Real-time reports show:

• Visual and audible threshold alerts on critical conditions, such as an unacceptably high rate of abandoned calls
• Updates on every campaign, regardless of the channel. From one consolidated view, the report shows current activity for voice, email and chat interactions
• How a campaign that is underway compares to a prior campaign
• Queue activity for every agent logged into the platform

Historical reports provide a view of past activities and define a baseline for comparisons. These reports are stacked with valuable data and statistics that inform an organization of its contact center’s health.

Historical reports show:

• Activity by date or by interval
• Number of dialer attempts to reach destination
• How a queue or group is performing compared to typical key performance indicators
• Agent activity from employment date to now, during the campaign time period, or during any specific time frame
• Reasons for incoming calls
• Campaign performance stats

Six Steps to Strengthen Your Contact Center Health

Now that the reports have revealed an accurate measure of the contact center, what’s next? Take these proactive steps to strengthen your contact center’s overall health to drive greater levels of customer satisfaction and sales.

1. Add training classes

   If a subset of agents are under-performing or consistently making the same mistakes, schedule mandatory refresher courses that focus on specific skills, features or any aspect that will improve how they interact with customers.

2. Rework schedules

   Reports show when call traffic volumes spike and when all you can hear are the crickets. Change the agents’ schedules to best accommodate busy times and reduce hours for non-busy times to save costs and ensure agent productivity.

3. Update the campaign

   Test results from a split campaign or early results can show that the effort isn’t performing as expected. Know when to stop a campaign and go back to the drawing board to tweak the effort so the team can reach performance expectations.

4. Evaluate agent performance

   Before performance reviews, check the individual agent’s activities to understand how he or she is completing required tasks. Reports show agent response times, number of interactions completed, inactive times, comparisons to peers and more.

5. Identify major concerns and confusion from callers

   I What questions do agents field most often? Realizing where the confusion exists can help the organization add clearer, straightforward information. Changing a process or adding more explanations can minimize incoming support calls so agents can work on other revenue-generating projects.

6. Create reports for executives or board members

   These reports are huge assets for upcoming meetings about call center activity. They can show that trouble tickets have decreased, wait times are shorter, incoming calls are steadily increasing, sales are higher and much more. Showing business leaders real data and analysis builds a strong case for justifying call center costs, gaining additional funds and showcasing performance results.