Useful Reason Codes to Improve the User Journey
Imagine you are in charge of running a contact center as efficiently as possible. Contact centers require appropriate staffing levels that are dynamic and reporting to identify problem areas—the quality of reporting impacts the total cost of ownership (TCO) of any solution. Disposition codes play an important role. If agents are not using the appropriate dispositions or are choosing the catch-all “other,” then the feedback loop is broken, and the user journey will suffer.
Generic Disposition Codes Create Confusion
We can all agree that accuracy and completeness in reporting are essential in decreasing a cost center such as a contact center. The customer experience will suffer from limited visibility to why or when calls become abandoned when average answer times are trending upward, or when agents are confused about summarizing the call. Understanding the customer journey and why they needed help is crucial to solving their problem by finding the right solution.
Suppose, for example, a limited list of codes is available for agents. The pandemic has caused many brick-and-mortar stores to augment their operating hours, so many calls are for basic operating hours inquiries. The current list of reason codes does not provide an option for business hours, so the agent’s only option is to use “other” and perhaps comment in the notes. A supervisor will now have to sift through a report and try to identify an upward trend. If the supervisor cannot quickly identify the trend, they can not implement IVR updates to automate this for callers. The business will suffer from higher costs, and customer engagement will take longer, which decreases satisfaction.
Implement Applicable Reason Codes Through Nesting and Advanced Reporting Capabilities
A contact center can quickly identify inefficiencies and improve by supporting multi-level dispositions, a rating system, and easy access to call recordings. A business that requires appointments could offer disposition options like new, reschedule, or cancel to drill down into appointments and determine why there may be an increase in rescheduling or cancellation requests. Supervisors who can provide a rating system for agents directly in the application can effectively coach newer employees and identify high-performance individuals for promotion. Listening to call recordings for correctly identified complaints is a valuable tool to determine where the customer journey broke down and repairing the customer’s trust.
Summary
The customer journey is fraught with many opportunities to take a wrong turn. As business owners grapple with dynamically changing staffing levels, hours of operation, and lack of visibility as to why their customers are having issues, the customer experience is degraded and likely to impact revenue. A flexible and feature-rich platform can address these challenges by offering multi-level dispositions, a built-in rating system, and the ability to listen to or download call recordings on the fly. Additionally, providing a plethora of pre-built reports for the most common metrics will increase the effectiveness of the contact center and reduce the TCO.
Don’t let generic reason codes create a lack of visibility and drive customers to the competition.
