Microsoft Teams updates - Fall 2021
Have you followed all the latest Microsoft Teams updates? If you feel you have missed something, don’t worry!
In this article, we have summarized the most important news, including the ones announced during the last Microsoft Ignite 2021, in November.
CHATS
- Delayed delivery - Soon you will be able to easily schedule messages to be sent when you prefer. This feature will be useful if you write a message and you want it to be delivered at a specific time.
- Enhanced research - Searching for information in Teams will be (finally- we were all looking forward to it!) faster. Thanks to new results filters and the possibility to toggle between tabs (messages, people, files), you will find what you need in a flash.
- Check people’s time zones - If you are used to collaborating with people based in a different time zone, being certain you are not messing up with meeting invites is not child’s play. The contact form will contain this information, helping you to optimize communication flow by decreasing response time.
- Chat with self - We know that chatting to yourself may sound strange, but it could be helpful. Soon in Teams, you can have this opportunity to have a secure private chat where you can save quick notes, drafts, ideas, and reminders.
WEBINARS AND MEETINGS
- Role assignation - When organizing a meeting, you will be able to assign people roles, such as presenters and co-organizers, and set who can change meeting options, create polls, and manage breakout rooms. This option can definitely improve the way you o manage online events in Teams.
- Hands-up order tracking - When presenting a webinar or during meetings, it isn’t so easy to understand in which order participants have raised their hand. To overcome this and avoid unpleasant situations, you can soon view the hands-up order to let attendees talk in the right sequence. Moderating Q&A sessions will be easier thanks to this option.
- Intelligent camera capture - Soon what you write on a physical whiteboard or documents can be captured by an intelligent camera and displayed on the screen as a high-quality image during meetings. This will be an interesting mix of the physical spaces and the virtual ones to increase engagement with, for example, hand-made graphics during a live event.
- New avatars experience - Hybrid work is a trend that is here to stay: people will continue to work from different places and for several reasons not everyone likes to turn on the camera during virtual meetings. Microsoft has introduced Mesh for MS Teams, bringing a new generation of 2D and 3D meeting experiences with personalized avatars and immersive spaces. This solution will use artificial intelligence to simulate facial expressions, eye contact, human gestures, achieving to maintain engagement and provide a sense of real presence during events. With Mesh for Microsoft Teams, in addition to this opportunity, you can create a new virtual space, resembling the physical ones, where avatars gather to collaborate and communicate feeling like they are in the same place in the physical world, like sharing documents and presentations on the same multimedia whiteboard in a meeting room .“We allow you to connect with presence and have a shared immersive experience directly in Teams”, said Satya Nadella, CEO at Microsoft.
- Virtual green room - You can soon create a virtual room in Teams, not accessible to the attendees, where event organizers and presenters can socialize and keep in touch before and during the event. This will improve collaboration and also the organization and management of live events in Teams.
- New attendees experience - While attendees wait for the event to start, it will be possible to set a welcome image and let them use the Q&A chat. Moderators can also review their questions before they are published and they will have the possibility to flag and pin the most relevant ones- together with their respective answers- in the Q&A space to make them more visible to attendees. This will avoid the repetition of similar questions during the event.
COLLABORATION
- Microsoft Loop - Working together will never be so easy: a new collaborative application will be available soon in Teams to help hybrid work models. This new feature will allow you to quickly create new workplaces with interactive widgets (e.g. tabs, notes, lists) and shared pages to collaborate simultaneously with other people, updating documents in real-time for all users across multiple applications. It will be easy to develop a joint project, with multiple apps data, and keep track of progress in a unique virtual space in Microsoft Teams.
- Teams Connect - This is going to become a new way to improve collaboration with people outside your company: you will have the capability to create a cross-company workplace to share files and channels with up to 50 teams, write documents, and chat also with people outside your organization.
What do you think about these new features? In the meantime stay updated by subscribing to our Newsletter here.
How to complete Microsoft Teams offer with enterprise telephony solution - webinar
Are you a service provider or a system integrator? What do you know about Direct Routing and contact center applications for Microsoft Teams? If you want to know more about this topic to help your customers choose the right UC solutions, you should save this date: 18th November 10 am CET. Patton Electronics will be hosting a webinar, in collaboration with us, where we will explain how enterprise telephony can be brought into Teams, thanks to Patton certified SBC combined with Mida products for Teams.
Mida and Patton partnership in a nutshell
In July 2021 we announced our partnership with Patton Electronics and the tested interoperability between our UC applications for Microsoft Teams and their SBCs certified for Direct Routing in Microsoft Teams (click here to read our article).
This partnership is a win-win collaboration which provides our joint customers with a complete and trusted offering for MS Teams, allowing them to move their communications in Teams without any thoughts, focusing only on the operational aspects. The testing phase Patton and Mida completed a few months ago, has swept away any technical complexity, making adoption and configuration much easier for IT Managers.
“The partnership with Patton is part of a wide-ranging project: we have invested a lot of resources over the last few years to integrate the Mida for MS Teams suite with a wide range of certified SBCs. This is because we think it is essential that customers can keep their trusted suppliers, if that is feasible,” said Marco Cortese, our President. “Patton is an international company and we are therefore proud to be able to offer their customers the possibility of using Mida contact centers, attendant consoles and recorder in MS Teams.”
Why you should attend this webinar
Patton and Mida during this one-hour webinar will explain why our UC solution for Microsoft Teams, together with their SBC offering, are the perfect mix for your corporate communications in Teams.
We will show participants how Patton certified SBC can securely enable the connection to the PSTN, how our professional voice applications for Teams (contact center, attendant console and recorder) integrate in the new telephony architecture, and the consequent advantages for both the final users and their Managers. We will show in detail what the tangible benefits of adopting Teams as a single hub are, and how to leverage the suite to manage the entire corporate communications.,
Don’t miss the opportunity to participate in the live Q&A, share your thoughts and clarify any doubts you may have. You will have the chance to address them directly to Marco Cortese, Sales Manager and President at Mida Solutions, and Gilberto di Pietro, Regional Sales Director at Patton Electronics.
Please note that the event is reserved for service providers and system integrators!
If you belong to one category or the other, then get on board registering here to book your virtual seat.
Meet us at “It’s all banking & insurance” - 2021
Next week we will attend “It’s all banking & insurance”, the event focused on technological solutions for the banking and insurance sectors. Despite you being a service provider, system integrator, or end-user, we will be happy to personally meet you in Milan in NH Milano Congress Centre. We will leverage this one-day event to present to visitors the UC solutions we built specifically to meet this markets’ requirements.
About the event
“It’s all banking & insurance” is the annual event that gathers technology vendors from all over the country, to present to Finance decision-makers and Managers the latest frontiers of technological and process innovation. It definitely represents a good opportunity to bring decision-makers, leaders, technology business’ managers together to develop new opportunities, inspire fintech innovation, and explore new markets and new solutions.
More than 500 participants, 100 speakers, 40 sponsors & exhibitors are expected. There will be 16 panel discussions on different fintech topics, including - just to name a few - IT service management, contact center, blockchain, and credit management.
Why should you attend?
Since Mida Solutions’ foundation, we have invested a lot on the research and development of our products. We have worked side by side with some of the main bank groups for years and over the years we refined our solutions for the Financial market to promptly meet their peculiar business needs. Our suite comprehends:
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- Attendant Console, a centralized customer service application, that can help your agents offer a better customer experience to banks’ customers.
- Compliance Recording, a complete recording solution able to safely record any type of call, both administrative and trading ones. It supports all recording methods: total, selective, on-demand, active and passive.
This UC suite makes finance business communications easier, providing your customers with quality service:
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- Intuitive - It’s simple to use and can be integrated with bank processes and the main CRM systems, to streamline agents’ workflows;
- Accessible from anywhere - It’s a web-based solution that allows to cut management costs and implement remote and hybrid work;
- Modular - It’s compatible with the main telephone vendor, such as Cisco and Microsoft Teams;
- Reliable - It’s adopted by more than 100 enterprises worldwide;
- Secure- It’s compliant with the latest privacy regulations (GDPR, MiFID II);
- Integrated into your business processes - It’s integrated with blockchain systems for a maximum level of data/processes security.
For further information about how Mida can support Finance enterprises with these dedicated solutions, please visit our website here.
3 reasons to adopt a contact center with CRM integration
The choice of which contact center platform to adopt is a complex task: there are many aspects to take into consideration, and they range from technical features, compatibility with pre-existing business applications and budget, just to list a few, but there’s one thing you want to be there for sure: the integration with your CRM. According to a recent Cisco survey, 2 out of 3 companies have already started to invest in this direction so let’s analyze together why this is among the most requested features of a contact center:
- Enhanced customer experience - The CRM integration helps to collect relevant customer information, that is useful to promptly handle any contact center incoming request: your agents can have access in real-time to all the details (e.g. personal and order data) they need while they are serving the call, with no need to put the caller on hold to search for them in other repositories or platforms. Seamless information connectivity helps agents to be more proactive in the conversation and able to grasp customers’ hidden needs, they can then share with other stakeholders for up-selling and cross-selling activities.. Nowadays the customer perception of the support service received by a company is crucial as it directly impacts the intent of purchase: 50% of people say that they would pay more for a product/service if the company they purchase from provides good support (Hubspot 2021 customer service report). Given the fact that acquiring a new customer is more expensive than maintaining a healthy and satisfactory relationship with an existing one, this customer service integration will play a key role in achieving this goal.
- Increased first call resolution rate - Agents' capability to access customers’ history is a real added value which can be conclusive in providing the solution the caller needs, during the first call. First call resolution rate is a critical customer service metric, and - despite the fact that it is not the one and only KPI to take into consideration when assessing the service performances- it’s among the key indicators of the service quality. The integration with the CRM helps agents increase these statistics, which is good also from their personal fulfillment point of view.
- Agents’ performances empowered with shared information - The two previous points are interconnected with the third one because the information collected from the CRM also helps your employees to empower their performances. Agents are more efficient as they can focus just on the current interaction without any extra interruptions. Each information about the customer is available in his/her CRM record, and it is shared within all departments.. This allows repetitive tasks, such as inserting personal or purchase data, to be reduced to the minimum or even zeroed: agents’ reporting tasks regard just new information shared by the caller during the call. Moreover, in some professional contact centers, callers are pre-filtered by an automated attendant, which helps the caller to speak with the best agent available based on the topic of the call.
To deepen this topic and discover the integration of our contact center with Dynamics and Salesforce, do not hesitate to contact us here. We will be happy to help you understand which is the right UC solution for your business!
6 tips to empower your agents' performances
No more doubts about the importance of keeping your agents motivated: the way your operators engage in their work, how they feel during the day, and how they organize their daily activities is often underestimated but these aspects definitely influence how they interact with your customers. Rather obviously, happy agents make your customer happier. Gaining more autonomy and feeling like they can really make the difference in helping customers, agents will be more productive and motivated. How can you help empower them?
Let’s analyze together 6 tips for enhancing your agents’ performances:
- Train your employees and create a team culture - According to recent research, 68% of customers claim that agent’s empathy is essential in customer service to make them more satisfied with the support they receive. For this reason, your agents must be solutions-focused and they must be trained to use positive language and to communicate clearly with empathy. Specific training courses could make them feel more comfortable during conversations with customers, pushing beyond their bounds of patience and practicing proactive and active listening. Preparing your agents to deal with peaks of stress and complex tasks can make the difference: from the business point of view, making your agents motivated and able to manage any issues customers may call for, will mean having them conscious of how valuable their role in the company is.
- Give operators the right UC tools - Agents must rely on a UC platform that helps them to perform at their best every day and to provide a top-quality service. They need to be supplied with appropriate, easy, and intuitive tools to properly welcome customers in a satisfactory way. Having customers’ historical records at hand, and having the opportunity to quickly leave notes or involve in the issue of other stakeholders within the company - through a CRM integration - can make the difference for them, possibly increasing the first call resolution rate. Advanced UC solutions also help decrease stress and customer frustration. This crucial aspect is detailed in the next bullet point.
- Ease the access to shared information - Listen to your agents to understand what they need to improve their performances. Being able to rely on shared information and multichannel resources will help agents be effective in their job. It is unthinkable that, during a conversation with a customer, your agent puts him/her on hold several times to search and collect all the information needed to have a wider picture of the issue he is in charge of solving. Agent workflow must be smart and all the information needed has to be available in a few clicks.
- Grant employees adequate beaks - Allow your agents to manage their availability manually both for after-call work activities and for short breaks, especially when they work from home (read more about remote customer service tips in this article). The software you use to manage incoming calls must give them the possibility not to receive calls during these absences. Missed calls negatively impact agents’ performance rate, so this can be a displeasing source of stress for them.
- Share with agents their performance KPIs and give them goals and periodical feedback - In order to improve or maintain a high customer service quality standard, your agents should be updated on how they are performing and briefed on how this data is interpreted: if operators can see their KPIs directly in a dashboard inside the platform they use to manage calls, they can understand by themselves how to enhance productivity, increase their efficiency and better handle customers’ requests. Motivate them with goals to increase their performance KPIs and give them your feedback about their job and customers’ feedback about the service they have provided.
- Purposes and rewards are better than penalizations - As said before, you might motivate your employees with goals and rewards but it’s crucial you don’t burden agents with the presence of a supervisor, who controls their activities and performance through a dedicated dashboard view in the UC platform they use.. Do not sadden them for their errors but give them the chance to admit them and give them a second chance... Remember that their opinions are as important as yours: listen to them and give them hints. Working in customer service can be sometimes monotonous but making agents feel like they are making the difference for the company and for your customers, will do good both to your staff’s determination and your business.
Keep in mind that empowering agents’ working activities and the tools they use impact directly on the customer experience, increasing contact center productivity and efficiency. These aspects must be coexistent because both are critical to your business’ success.
To go deeper into how a cloud contact center could help your agents check our product page Mida C3 page.
Microsoft Teams Updates - Summer 2021
Microsoft Teams never stops its improvement process to provide always the best user experience. Even in these summer months, Microsoft has announced several features focused on increasing participants’ engagement during meetings.
Have you lost some of them? Don’t worry, we got you covered! In this article we have summarized the most important ones, to help you take full advantage of Teams for your business meetings and webinars and improve your attendees’ experience:
- “Lock the meeting” option - This new feature allows organizers to block latecomers who want to join started meetings: a dedicated message informs them they are not allowed to join anymore. This solution is helpful to avoid speakers' distractions and at the moment is available only when using the Teams desktop app.
- Mobile layout optimization - A large gallery view is now available also for mobile devices. This helps you and your attendees engage better with your meetings from any place.
- Automatic meeting recordings - Now in the settings tabs of the Desktop or Mobile Teams App it is possible to activate the “record automatically” option to auto-record a meeting in Teams when the first participant of your organization joins it and then save the recorded file in your corporate OneDrive or SharePoint account.
- Live transcription in English-US and recording search - Thanks to this new feature, your participants can keep track of what was said during your meeting, especially in the event they join late the meeting. Thanks to this feature, users can search the recorded meeting in Teams by using Microsoft Search: through the same search tab in Teams they use to find other file types, they’ll be able to find recorded meetings in a moment. This search is based on the words included in the live transcription.
- Virtual laser pointer and slide transcription on PowerPoint Live - When slides are shared your speaker can point a virtual laser to indicate in the slides what he/she is talking about, making the meeting much more interesting. With PowerPoint Live there is also now a featured participant can access by clicking on the “more options' three dots, which allows them to better understand your speech by viewing the slides in one of the 19 available languages. These improvements state that Microsoft is struggling to always add new inclusive features.
- New message notification - Now, during meetings, it isn’t necessary to open the chat to view new messages: when a new message arrives a pop-up notification appears on the screen to inform you instantly.
- Lower all hands option - This option allows meeting organizers and presenters to lower all hands by clicking one button in the participant area. This is useful when all attendees’ questions are handled during meetings.
- Unmute for questions - During online meetings, often participants are muted by organizers and presenters but with this new feature, the attendee who raised his/her hand and wants to speak can unmute him/herself without waiting for the permission of the presenter.
- Spotlight up to 7 participants - Now it’s possible to pin more than one person simultaneously on desktop and mobile devices. This option, settable by organizers and presenters, allows to increase attendees’ attention and focus it on some specific users. Their profile picture or their video are pinned in a dedicated area on the screen.
- Attendance Dashboard - After a Teams meeting or a webinar, now a dashboard shows insights on the meeting: the number of people registered and participants and key information about them, such as name, duration of participation, join time, leave time, and role. This is useful for reporting and analyzing needs.
- Dynamics 365 Marketing connection - After an online meeting in Teams, the marketing team can set up follow-up customized emails for the attendees.
Are you ready to try these new Microsoft Teams features? To know also how you can fulfill customer expectations by handling professionally your UC in Teams, contact us here. We will be glad to know your project and expectations in moving Voice to Microsoft Teams!
No barriers for visually impaired and blind operators: the partnership with Vision Dept
The steady growth of customer service importance has placed more attention on user experience and how to meet call center employees' needs. To perform their job at best operators must be able to rely on professional tools, but what about visually impaired and blind agents? They need dedicated UC software with assistive technology to help them use computers.
Mida Solutions has relied on the collaboration with a best-of-breeds company as Vision Dept, to adapt its iconic product - Mida Attendant Console- to the special needs of visually impaired and blind operators.
Vision Dept is an Italian distributor of products and services for the visually impaired with the mission of helping them in their job thanks to innovative solutions and strong customer training and on-site assistance. In Italy, Vision Dept is known as the exclusive distributor for Italy for Freedom Scientific, the worldwide developer of software (e.g. Jaws) and hardware solutions for the visually impaired.
A re-engineerization of the product and the integration with some of the most common Magnifier and vocalization software on the market, allowed Mida and Vision Dept to meet customers’ demands in many projects over the years.
"Vision Dept has always worked with the aim of allowing blind and visually impaired people to be efficient. Our dream is to enable them to do the job that really satisfies them. The collaboration with Mida Solutions is really successful and, together, we managed to offer dozens of users a seamless working experience." says Andrea Amaglio, Technical and Sales Account at Vision Dept
For visually impaired operators the key elements we have included in the product are:
- compatibility with screen magnifiers as ZoomText, Magic, Cobra
- extreme customization- the console gives operators the possibility to choose fonts, colors, font size, contrasts, and shortcuts
- optimized layout, which contains just essential information
While for blind operators the solutions have:
- compatibility with the most used vocalization technologies, such as Jaws and NVDA. This helps them manage calls while using the same vocalizer they are familiar with. This improves their user experience with Mida Attendant Console while helping them handling calls
- optimization - the console layout is optimized for enlargers to increase performance and products' usability.
- keyboard shortcut to perform actions - the operator can use shortcuts to quickly search for the information he/she needs, as for example, the number of calls in the queue. The shortcuts can be fully customized by each operator, to meet his/her specific needs.
One of the most appreciated aspects of our partnership is the on-site support we provide to visually impaired and blind operators in the installation and training phase.
“Understanding the peculiarities of each visually impaired and blind operator and helping them in the first usage is essential to enhance them in their daily work activities. With our Attendant Console, their disability is not an obstacle and they feel integrated in their workplace” says Marco Cortese, Sales Manager and Owner of Mida Solutions.
To go deeper into this UC product check our dedicated page and do not hesitate to contact us to adopt it.
Mida has passed the interoperability tests for Microsoft Teams
As announced months ago, Mida Solutions is in Microsoft Teams Connected Contact Center Certification Program. We have made another big step towards Microsoft’s official certification, as Mida C3 Cloud Contact Center has just successfully completed all the interoperability tests which certify its integration with Microsoft Teams.
tekVizion, Microsoft’s exclusive test lab partner, just publicly confirmed Mida has successfully passed this important technical test phase.
Who is tekVizion?
tekVizion enables their customers to continuously validate their collaboration solutions with tekVizion’s automation platform, lab infrastructure, and expertise.
For over 20 years, Service Providers, ISVs, platform and device vendors, and many others have selected tekVizion as the authorized testing and certification partner. tekVizion provides the resources and tools businesses need for full functional testing and validation without compromising quality and reliability. Microsoft has launched a certification program with tekVizion to verify the interoperability between connected contact center solutions and Teams and to enforce Microsoft’s high-quality standards.
“We are delighted to help Mida Solutions with their interoperability certification for Microsoft Teams so they can continue providing the quality, reliability, and functionality their customers expect.” said Darlene Smith, VP of tekVizion Labs.
The importance of the Microsoft Teams Certification Program
Due to the exponential growth of Microsoft Teams adoption as a collaboration and communication hub, the urge to add advanced call management functions to Teams’ native ones, has become a must in the business environment. Mida Solutions have committed itself to leverage its long-time competencies in the Unified Communications market to deliver a complete yet intuitive solution that allows enterprises to have their contact center integrated with Microsoft Teams: both internal and external communications can be efficiently managed in Microsoft Teams, allowing operators to focus more on listening to customers’ needs than on the technology behind the call...
Microsoft has created a specific certification program for ISVs proposing connected contact center solutions, to reassure final customers that the products which have successfully obtained the certification, satisfy Microsoft quality and security standards...
The interoperability tests we have just completed with tekVizion demonstrate that Mida C3 Cloud Contact Center is a solution that -from the technical point of view- is able to connect and integrate with MS Teams seamlessly.
“Our goal was to deliver not just another contact center. We have started working on MS Teams long before it became the popular collaboration platform we are all familiar with today. The connected contact center option gives enterprises the freedom to maintain their own service provider, so the deployment is very quick and it implies a lower level of commitment for the IT department.
Our contact center helps enterprises combine internal and external communications in a single tightly knit system within Microsoft Teams. Plus, the integration with other business-critical applications like Dynamics, Salesforce and PowerBI ensures no information is lost in the communications between customers and the companies’ departments” says Attilio Licciardello, co-founder of Mida Solutions.
To know more information about the Mida connected contact center for Teams and how it can boost your external communications, please refer to the dedicated page.
Mida confirms the interoperability with Patton eSBC for Teams Direct Routing
We are happy to announce the recently tested interoperability between our UC applications for Microsoft Teams and Patton Electronics SBCs certified for Direct Routing in Microsoft Teams.
Just a few weeks ago Patton has publicly announced they obtained the certification for interoperability with Microsoft Teams: the Patton SmartNode eSBC series has been certified by Microsoft for Direct Routing, a feature that enables the SBC to act as a connector between Teams and any SIP or PSTN services.
Patton is a long-lasting US manufacturer of UC, cloud, and IoT enabling solutions. Its mission is to provide high-quality and right-priced solutions, networking & access, and Industrial Connectivity products and services for customers worldwide. They have been Microsoft partners for many years, and the certification of the eSBC series for Teams came as a natural continuation of it, also considering the increased demand for Teams integrated UC applications in general.
“With a Patton session border controller Teams solution, organizations that use Microsoft Teams can choose with confidence any business-class telephony calling service they prefer,” said Marjan Torkar, President EMEA and CEO Patton-Inalp, “with no worries about interoperability delays during implementation or troubleshooting headaches during operation.”
Patton’s Microsoft Teams session border controller and Microsoft Teams gateway allow Teams users to employ an external SIP or PSTN communications service provider for external phone calls while obtaining the benefits of the UC platform. Mida C3 Cloud Contact Center for Teams- the Connected contact center by Mida- interoperates smoothly with Patton SBCs, empowering the agents with the advanced call management features they need, directly within their Teams environment.
“The certification of our Smartnode SBC series for MS Teams Direct Routing extends the scope of our solutions and allows partners like Mida Solutions to enrich their offer for collaboration services and Unified Communications for Microsoft Teams," said Gilberto di Pietro, regional sales director at Patton.
“This new partnership is a win-win situation for our joint customers: the tested interoperability between our systems removes any technical complexity, allowing them to focus just on the operational aspects of their new contact center solution in MS Teams.” added Marco Cortese, co-founder and President of Mida.
C3 is a product already available for enterprises worldwide and is included in the Connected Contact Center for Microsoft Teams Certification Program. This process we’re about to complete is an additional guarantee that the solution we’ve created for Teams provides customers with the quality, compatibility, and reliability expected from Microsoft solutions.
Want to know more about our partnership with Patton Electronics and Direct Routing for Microsoft Teams? Find out more on this page.
5 crucial contact center KPIs you need to track
Contact center is the place where most of the first interactions between your company and your customers take place. As per in-person meetings, you probably won’t have a second chance to make a good first impression. That is why it is crucial your agents have the right competencies and the appropriate tech applications to ensure top-quality support to customers, solving their issues quickly, possibly exceeding their expectations.
Giving due weight to contact center KPIs can help you to meet this challenge and increase customer satisfaction.
Which are the 5 Contact Center KPIs you must measure for success?
Let’s analyze together the most important KPIs you need to keep under control to provide your customers with an outstanding customer experience:
1- Average Handle Time (AHT) - is a metric that measures the average amount of time an agent spends on a call with the customer. It comprehends both the time spent actively on the conversation with the caller, the total hold time and the after-call work, that is the post-call processing. AHT varies according to customer issues’ complexity and to the time the agent uses for the after-call actions (e.g. write notes, scheduling follow-up, update colleagues). This KPI is fundamental, as it contributes to painting the portrait of how the service is performing.
AHT = (Total talk time + total hold time + after call work time) / total number of calls
This measure can be an indicator of the agents’ performance but not necessarily the shorter the AHT is, the better the quality of the service: if an agent is more concerned on closing tickets rather than solving issues, its performance will be poor, even with a lower AHT. With that said, there are several best practices you can adopt to reduce it:
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- implement a contact center with a queue management service that efficiently routes calls to the most appropriate operator, according to the call distribution algorithm that best suits your business’ needs;
- plan an appropriate training for operators, to put them in a position where they can solve customers' requests directly, reducing hold times during the conversation;
- make sure your contact center is integrated with your CRM software. CRM integration empowers agents as they can read customers’ record history and add their additional notes in a few seconds.
AHT is one of the most important key indicators for agents' performance because, in an ideal scenario, the issue should be solved before closing the conversation. This leads to the second KPI of this article.
2 - First Call Resolution Rate (FCR) - FCR measures the number of customer interactions that your support staff is able to resolve at the first time of asking. FCR is an indicator of your support service quality because it is proof of your agents’ ability to immediately meet customers’ requests.
The higher your FCR is the more satisfied your customers are: consider that 82% of people say they decide to change supplier because of poor customer support. To increase your FCR you can follow the advices of the previous point because, as shown before, the two aspects are strictly related. Keep in mind also that lowering FCR you will not have the same customers calling a second, or a third time, so you will save in customer service costs.
3- Average Hold Time in the Queue - This key performance indicator measures how long the caller is placed on hold in a queue before being served by an agent. People don't like the boring waiting time when they call a company/call center: 35% of customers will hang up the call after 1 minute of waiting and two-thirds will hang up after 3 minutes. Minimize the waiting time is essential for customer satisfaction so we advise you to:
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- choose how many agents should be active at the same time according to the average volume of calls you receive, considering a margin to deal with high peaks.
- adopt an IVR (or Automated Attendant) to welcome callers in the best way, guiding them through pre-recorded audio messages, to the most appropriate service queue.
- invest in an advanced queue management system to route incoming calls and transfer them to the caller's desired extension (or department) without the need for a human operator. In this way your agents will receive only calls that need a human interaction, minimizing also the number of transferred calls.
Please keep in mind that Average Hold Times should not be confused with the time people are put on hold by the agent during a conversation to search for additional information or data, useful to solve their issues. This is another KPI you can track and analyze to improve your agents’ performances.
4- Call Abandonment Rate - There could be many reasons why customers abandon calls: it can be related to how you designed the queue, how much time the caller is placed on hold (as shown before), how many times the call is transferred, and also to the operator’s performance. The percentage of calls hanged up before being served or before the issues being solved is a key indicator of your support service quality. To reduce this rate you can:
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- reduce hold time in the queue (as shown before in bullet #3);
- train your agents properly to solve specific requests without transfer the call or place the call on hold;
- optimize your welcome messages to give key information and take advantage of the voice menu;
- optimize call flow routing to assign calls to the right department and the most appropriate agents.
5- Transfer Rate - This KPI is indicative of agents performance and of call routing: if it is a high number this means that your agents are not able to solve the issues customers call for, either because they have no efficient training or the calls are assigned to a wrong operator or department. We suggest you to go deeper into this, as understanding why so many calls are being transferred, can spotlight refinements points for your customer service.
Analyzing these KPIs allows you to have a clear view of your support service performances and quality and it gives you some crucial suggestions on how to plan a strategic business plan to improve it..
To go deeper into these 5 KPIs, check their expanded definitions on our website on the Knowledge Hub section.