Does Your Call Plan Have More Snakes Than Ladders?

At NewVoiceMedia we believe that the most important person in the contact centre is the one on the other end of the phone - your customer.

Too often call plans are built from the internal perspective of your business: "Here are my agents, how do I get the most amount of calls through them in the shortest period of time?"

We encourage our customers to empathise with their callers, and to think of the call plan from their perspective.

Scott Hawkins from our Professional Services team does this by asking customers to think of their call plan like a game of snakes and ladders.

Every time you put in a feature that accelerates your caller towards the best agent to deal with their query you give them a ladder:

• Using their CLID to pull data from a CRM
• Asking them to input an Account Number or Case Reference
• Linking multiple sites to give round the clock support

But every time you put a poorly constructed feature in place you hamper their progress and give them a snake.

• Complex Multi-choice Multi-layer IVR's
• Call plan branches that don't have agents available
• Single impersonal queues for all callers

Scott illustrates his point, "We have all been in the situation where we call a contact centre and are confronted with a multi layered IVR giving you a number of options apart from the one you really want! ...I’ll choose the ‘any other enquiry press 5 option’ and then begin to queue."

"Eventually I am top of the queue and my call is answered, only then to be told that I need to speak to another department but the advisor will kindly put me through. I've hit a snake and slide down to the bottom of yet another queue!"

Scott recommends that as you build your call plan have a look at each feature, queue, group or option that you are implementing, and think about it from the perspective of your callers. Does this feature benefit our callers, or just our company?

Your customers shouldn't view your call plan as an opponent that must be beaten! When customers believe that every choice, every option, every bit of information they are being asked for is there to help them get their answer quicker then overall customer satisfaction is the benefit.

Do you build your call plan from the perspective of your agents or your callers?

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Image Credit: Fun Free Party Games