Manual Skilling Has Significant Negative Consequences for Contact Center

 While most contact centers today are automated to some degree, there is still an enormous “human factor” in the day-to-day operation of the average center. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the management of agents’ skills, and the skills-based routing that most contact centers need to engage in today to provide better, faster and more targeted and personalized customer care.

It’s not unusual for contact center managers to need to engage in regular manual adjustments in the management of skills. While this is time-consuming, time isn’t the only thing that is lost. Companies often take actions based on assumptions, though when those assumptions are put under a microscope, they’re often found to be untrue. According to a recent blog post by Stuart Lander of Genesys (News - Alert), these incorrect assumptions can have huge operational and performance implications.

Lander notes that by drilling down to examine what’s really happening in the contact center and replacing  manual skill changes with preset routing rules within a skill-based routing engine, companies can save time and money and create a better customer experience.

“Increasingly, a key contact center best practice is to inspect your call center operations and identify and test key assumptions – in this case, better understanding the use and scale of manual skill changes,” wrote Lander. “The practice for automating manual skill changes with skills-based routing based on specific present routing rules can dramatically improve the performance of any contact center environment.”

Part of the performance improvement comes from better call handling capacity, and the reduced chances of calls being lost, transferred or put on hold, which improves the quality of the customer experience. While many companies may not believe they are losing much productivity from manual skilling, even a small amount of manual work drives down productivity and call quality.

“Even in a best case scenario, where manual changes prevent agents from handling calls for only one percent of their work time, the collective lost time adds up to significant lost capacity and productivity when multiplied across your entire agent population,” wrote Lander.

The increased visibility into operations allows managers to forecast better and build improved schedules, all the while reducing judgement calls that can lead to errors and long call queues. This way, managers are better positioned to be able to manage their contact center based on facts, not assumptions.

Edited by Stefania Viscusi

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