I am quite certain there are over a hundred things you could do or change in an effort to improve customer service at your

company. In a recent article by Pract ical eCommerce entitled: 5 Techniques for Excellent Online Customer Service, aut hor Gagan Mehra discusses the heightened importance of customer service in todays socially connected world, and goes on to provide five techniques that its reade rs might want to consider. Today, Id like to focus on just one area lowering call center wait times and how this can help to improve customer service at your com pany. The Infamous Elevator Music While Your Customer Waits You know customers loathe waiting to have their questions or issues dealt with b y a contact center agent. Sure, sometimes you might get a good tune to listen to while you wait, but Im sure customers could think of better ways to spend their time. A Few Problems With Traditional Methods of Lowering Call Center Wait Times So, the question arises: Whats the best way to lower call center wait times? An i nitial response by companies might be to hire more contact center agents (or get help from a third-party contact center agency) to handle the increase in call v olume. Either way, additional and ongoing costs will be incurred as a result of the extra head count, training, etc. A second idea to lower call center wait times would be to analyze the phone con versations of hundreds of contact center agents, identify the key components of a typical conversation, understand the critical issues, questions, or common the mes, and train your contact center agents accordingly. This will no doubt ensure your staff become highly proficient and skilled in handling certain customer qu estions and should lead to lower call center wait times for your customers. With this approach, we are moving one step in the right direction because it lea ds to call center staff being more productive, which is always good for business . However, a few questions emerge with this method. Should your call center staf f really be handling every customer question or issue in the first place? And se condly, are these productivity gains sustainable? Every company is continually i ntroducing new products or services and customers will inevitably have new and c omplex questions and issues that your contact center will need to help them with . Companies could easily end up chasing their own tail as they continually train t heir staff on the more complex issues while ensuring all their staff still retai n their knowledge of answers to those common questions. Right Channel Your Way to Lower Call Center Wait Times A more sustainable and cost-effective way to lower call center wait times is thr ough a business process and technology strategy known as right channeling. Right channeling allows a company to choose the right communication channel for their prospects or customers and engage at the right time, through the right method. So what does right channeling mean for contact center, customer service, and cus tomer experience staff and managers? Customers now have a choice of how they want to contact your company (in person, phone, email, chat, and web), and this will help redirect a large volume of cus tomer inquiries and questions away from higher cost channels (e.g. contact cente r support), free up your contact center staff, and lower call center wait times. Lets examine how this can be accomplished. Web Self-Service Referring back to Gagan Mehras article, 5 Techniques for Excellent Online Custome r Service, its no surprise that the first technique mentioned was web self-servic e. Adding web self-service functionality to your companys website empowers your c

ustomers to serve themselves by providing them with all the tools to find the an swers to their questions. Actually, find is probably not the best choice of words since its incredibly simple for customers to obtain the answers to their question s. The best web self-service tools are built on an extensive question and answer (or knowledge) platform that leverages an advanced algorithm. On your companys w ebsite, customers simply type their question in natural language and they get a single, accurate, consistent and approved answer. They might also get a list of relevant questions or the top ten frequently asked questions, depending on the c ompanys preference. All the research that weve seen indicates that customers would rather self-serve online, so this alone will improve the customer experience while dramatically re ducing call center volume and lead to lower call center wait times. How much? In our experience, customers utilizing web self-service can reduce phone call volu me by 15-35%, and reduce email volume by 25-70%. Empower Your Contact Center Agents Heres where it gets really interesting. With web self-service capabilities availa ble on your website, you can lower call center wait times even further by provid ing your contact center agents with the same technology, improving their product ivity and effectiveness while actively engaged with a customer over the phone or email/chat. With this solution, agents can provide customers or prospects with one right answer when they actually do call or email your company or organizatio n. Specifically targeted to agents who need to get instant accurate answers, age nt-based solutions typically integrate seamlessly with the tools they are alread y using so agents can start using it immediately with minimal training. Lets look at some numbers. Theres a number of different call center metrics we could analyze, but well examin e two: average handling time (AHT) and first contact resolution (FCR). Our custo mers typically see a reduction in average handling time by 5% 30%. Every 1 secon d saved per call per agent results in $1,000 in annual cost savings. For a 500 p erson call center that is $500,000 savings per second that AHT is reduced! Addit ionally, our customers typically improve first contact resolution by 10-50%. An example is ING Direct who uses IntelliResponse as their primary tool for agents, and it has reduced escalations to level 2 agents by over 50%. While there are many ways to lower call center wait times, its hard to ignore the impressive results that web self-service can deliver. Web self-service solution s not only save your company money, but it truly does improve customer service s ince that massive volume of customer inquiries and questions can now be redirect ed from higher costs channels (e.g. phone) to lower cost channels (e.g. web) fre eing up your contact center staff, and lowering call center wait times in the pr ocess. Have a look at some of these web self-service customer successes on our website and youll quickly appreciate the value that web self-service (and related agent solutions) can add to your company. With more than 500 live customer-facing implementations answering 100 million+ q uestions, IntelliResponse is the gold standard in first line customer experience management. If you have any questions about this topic or web self-service sol utions in general, one of our solution experts would be pleased to assist you. F or more information about IntelliResponse, visit www.intelliresponse.com