Tell me if this has happened to you.

You have an urgent service issue, so you decide to call. The interactive voice response system (IVR) prompts you to enter some basic account information like the last four digits of your social security number.

The real frustration begins once you (finally) get a live agent on the phone and they ask you for the same information all over again.

Chances are, you got a little frustrated. "Why do I need to give you all this information?! Can't you just solve my problem?"

That led to a 30 second explanation full of nonsense about security, system limitations, and hints about evil bosses who will throw a fit if they don't verify it's really and truly you. It doesn’t make you feel any better, and you realize you just wasted more time.

The whole thing is a terrible experience.

And if your contact center is doing this to customers, you're also wasting precious handle time by not empowering your agents to serve people faster.

I’m going to show you three ways to fix that by providing more authority, resources, and procedures. But first, let’s look at how contact centers are wasting time.

How do contact centers waste time?

There are a number of common practices that waste time in contact centers. Some are overt, while others are more subtle. Here's a partial list:

• Not using caller ID to help verify the caller and pull up the customer record.

• Asking customers to share or verify data you don't use.

• Poor agent typing skills.

• Weak knowledge bases that cause agents to hunt for information.

• Lack of call control skills that would help agents effectively move the call.

There's another big one contact center leaders don't talk about. It's called priming, and it's a growing problem.

Here's a quick definition of priming from Psychology Today:

Priming is a phenomenon in which exposure to a stimulus, such as a word or image, influences how one responds to a subsequent, related stimulus.

The issue starts in other channels like self-service, social media, or chat which are frequently not optimized. Customers eventually give up and decide to call, which they often associate with wasting time.

Then your IVR steps in. Customers associate it with wasting even more time. So their frustration grows when they punch in menu options or try to get the speech recognition software to understand them.

Your poor agent now has an even angrier customer on the line when they finally get connected. And angry customers take longer to serve.

So your IVR is adding talk time, but your agents aren’t empowered to skip the script and give some of that time back. In fact, they're often required to waste more customer time, right at the start of the call by asking for a lot of nonsense before getting down to business.

What is agent empowerment?

An empowered agent is given more than just authority. They are enabled to provide exceptional customer service. 

Agents need three elements to be fully empowered:

• Authority

• Resources

• Procedures

Given the right empowerment, it would be easy for many contact centers to cut at least 15 seconds off their average handle time while improving the agent experience.

How can you quickly cut average handle time?

Let's take a look at the authority, resources, and procedures that can help agents provide better, faster service to their phone customers.

Authority

Allow agents to skip meaningless confirmation data. A customer calling to check the status of their order shouldn't need to share their mother's maiden name, favorite movie, and secret pin number just to get an answer. 

Here's how my dentist office verified my information when I called to schedule a cleaning appointment:

1. The employee used caller ID to identify me and pull up my file.

2. She asked, "Is this Jeff?"

3. The employee then asked me if my insurance had changed.

That was it. Quick and easy, and on to business.

The key was empowering the employee to understand what information needed to be verified. The nature of my call, scheduling an appointment, didn't require a lot of verification. It would have been understandable if she had to ask a lot of security questions in exchange for sharing sensitive information from my file.

Resources

We need to give our agents better tools to serve customers quickly. Here are just a few that would cut down on customer frustration and decrease handle time:

• An IVR that only requests information that's actually used.

• A better knowledge base so agents can quickly access information.

• Improved scheduling so agents are more available.

There are a surprising number of opportunities for contact centers to improve scheduling. Contact center expert Brad Cleveland shared several practical tips in an interview.

Procedures

Call control is becoming a lost art in the contact center.

If you're unfamiliar with the concept, it's a set of techniques for efficiently moving the call along in a way that the customer is happy with. It requires the agent to balance making the customer feel good with getting the job done quickly.

This short video introduces you to a few call control techniques.

Take Action

You don't need to believe me. Try an experiment for yourself. Start by dividing your agents into two groups:

• Group A: have them do things the way they've always done them.

• Group B: give them more authority, resources, and procedures to cut handle time.

Run your experiment over the course of two weeks. Look at the data in three areas to see how Group B compares to Group A:

• Handle time: Do the new techniques reduce average handle time?

• Quality: Do the new techniques improve or reduce call quality?

• Service: Are customers happier when the new techniques are used?