Striking the right balance for contact centre service levels

Datacom CX team

Striking the delicate balance between overservicing and underservicing in contact centre operations is essential for maintaining customer satisfaction and operational efficiency. Contact centres are the frontline warriors of customer interactions and face a constant tug-of-war between efficiency and quality.  
Effective resource management and scheduling ensures that resources – either digital or human – are aligned to your contact demand profile to handle customer interactions efficiently.  

Overservicing can occur when resources are not scheduled appropriately, resulting in unnecessary periods of idle time. In this scenario agents may create extra work by increasing talk time with no associated improvement in customer experience or quality, increasing the cost to service customer enquiries. Overservicing can also set unrealistic future client expectations resulting in perception of poorer CX for future interactions.   

On the flip side, underservicing arises when customer needs are not adequately met due to resource constraints or inadequate training. This can lead to longer wait times, in queue and speed to answer, rushed interactions, and customer dissatisfaction.  

 Achieving efficiency while upholding quality isn’t easy. There are myriad challenges facing contact centre operations teams – from managing fluctuating volumes to ensuring consistent service quality and preventing employee burnout – and to maintain customer satisfaction and loyalty, it is essential to get it right. 

We’ve asked our CX experts to share some practical strategies to help you find the sweet spot for service levels in your contact centre operations.  

While success has traditionally been measured with a strong emphasis on minimising average handling time (AHT), AHT is highly dependent on the complexity and sensitivity of an interaction. Shifting perspective to prioritise first-contact resolution is crucial. 

Through effective questioning to comprehensively understand the customer’s current enquiry, whilst also pre-empting potential future needs, agents can offer a comprehensive solution that addresses both present and anticipated concerns, supporting greater customer satisfaction and experience. 

This proactive approach ensures clients receive immediate answers and relevant information for upcoming enquiries, reducing the need for future contact. First contact resolution rates help contact centre managers understand efficiencies and potential gaps, highlighting where agents may struggle to address customer enquiries. 

Watch for signs of overservicing, such as prolonged call durations well beyond expected performance ranges. Monitor deviations from enquiries and hypothetical scenarios, considering enquiry complexity, client history and agent experience. Support quality coaching and development to help demonstrate what good and great looks like. 

Consider exploring if your contact centre technology stack provides agent assist capabilities that can support your agents during customer interactions, including offering guided workflows, making real-time suggestions, surfacing contextual and summarised information from knowledge bases, automated customer authentication, and other resources which are designed to assist agents to provide accurate and timely support to customers.  

Cultivate empathy and sensitivity in customer interactions while prioritising timely resolutions. Coach agents to handle sensitive calls efficiently without overextending. Emphasise the importance of timeliness alongside the depth of support provided in each interaction through your agent coaching conversations. Help them to understand the bigger picture, balancing then needs of the immediate customer with those of the customer waiting for assistance. Within a team, encourage two-way mentoring between agents with different skills. For example, one agent might be particularly skilful in a foreign language and connecting with customers, while another might excel in using technology to solve enquiries. 

Foster ongoing dialogue with clients to understand their unique needs and concerns. Collaborate on strategies to enhance service efficiency while improving the overall customer experience. Focus on outcomes and satisfaction rather than fixating solely on traditional metrics.  

Examples could include joint discussions on how customer communication channels can be used to help customers self-serve or answer basic questions using a voice bot, chatbot, or proactive engagement strategy. With technology working for you in a scalable way, agents are freed up to focus on higher value and more meaningful engagement with customers. This allows them to truly offer empathy in a difficult time or provide advice in a sales cycle. 

Customer satisfaction is a key indicator to understanding how customers view the effectiveness of our interactions. Modern technology allows us to measure and monitor customer sentiment, or levels of satisfaction, in real-time. Sentiment analysis uses artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) to analyse how a customer is feeling. These insights, paired with the use of speech analytics, provides additional understanding of how a customer was feeling at the start of the interaction, during the interaction, and at the completion of the interaction; as well as topics or phrases mentioned during the conversation that may have led to a change in sentiment. 

Post-interaction surveys continue to be a valuable way to gather feedback on the overall customer experience with post interaction surveys in real time, providing the opportunity for remediation activity when required. Consider conducting surveys at key milestones or outcomes rather than solely at the end of interactions.  

McKinsey’s 2024 Future of Work report found that 62% of hours spent on existing workforce activities can be automated by technology that is available today. There are huge opportunities for efficiency to be made by employing a single agent desktop strategy. This includes leveraging generative AI to surface and summarise information for an agent while listening to a conversation or integrating your customer relationship management (CRM) system with your interactive voice response (IVR) in combination with a voicebot to offer a service that can process an order, make a change to a customer request, and more. 

There are significant opportunities to streamline processes, improve operational efficiency, and offer a smoother customer experience. All these advances need to be led and balanced with having people there at the right time to design the ideal interaction, provide empathy when a customer really needs it, or offer advice when a customer might be lost in a world of information. This is how we will build customer loyalty, retention, and satisfaction. 

Getting the balance right with your customer servicing isn't just about financial gains — it's about making a meaningful impact with your customers. If you're unsure where to start, our team is here to assist you every step of the way. Whether it's analysing your call volumes, optimising your processes, or exploring new technological capabilities, we're ready to help you make a difference. Reach out to us today to take the next steps towards enhancing your customer experience.