Get in the driver’s seat to manage your inbound traffic

Do you know how many people have been trying to reach you? Or do you only see the ones that reached your system or platform?

Just recently one of our clients was happy to see all his agents and lines where busy as there was a sale going on. Not knowing that almost 30% of the calls were abandoned due to insufficient capacity.

Such situations might call for peak-time solutions to alleviate the stress and to ensure your customers are taken care of. So far, so good. However, would a more precise forecast help you next time to manage your inbound calls more efficiently?

We think so. Your operational decisions should be based on data, not on best guesses. At Sound of Data, we introduced online tooling (aka Gearbox) to assist you in making the right decisions.

Having a complete overview will help you with scheduling and forecasting. You can foresee peak hours and idle time. Mst of all, you will be able to meet the customer’s needs: answer his question as quickly as possible.

Waiting time to speak to a representative is one of the 5 most important customer service issues, according to research from CCW Digital. It is also something customers complain about the most. Nobody likes waiting! Therefore, having the right amount of call agents on duty is crucial. Not too many either, as you don’t want them sitting there fiddling about.

But then, how do you know how many customers will call? Do you listen to what call agents tell you? Do you look at your statistics and make an estimated guess?

Every call center has patterns in incoming calls. These can differ greatly among countries. Where one country will have a busy Monday morning, another country might enjoy a bank holiday. Gaining insight into these patterns will make it easier for you to arrange the appropriate occupancy (e.g. in terms of numbers of agents and language skills) to handle the load.

My Sound of Data is Sound of Data’s online tool to support your operational decisions, specifically those related to your customer services. It shows what you should know about your inbound calls and allows you to perform custom data analysis for better decision making. Its dashboard shows default data, such as:

• Number of calls and minutes real-time and historic
• Origination per country and per service number
• Number of unanswered calls
• Number of calls answered, in categories of their handling time (e.g. 20% < 30 sec., 50% in 30 sec. – 3 mins, 30% > 3 mins)

And Gearbox allows you to run almost any special report you wish. So if you would like to know the number of incoming calls per half hour per country per day, we can create a special report showing just that. For any type of data available, we can create a custom report.

The more service numbers run through Sound of Data’s platform, the better the analysis of your inbound traffic and performance. You will have a centralized overview and more insight to improve forecasting and decision making. Retrieve your information from a single source of data, instead of combining statistics and reports from different sources and in different formats. Isn’t that much more efficient?