How to measure potential costs savings in your contact center using AI

Every call center leader knows the particular metrics that translate into higher costs. The more calls you receive, the more agents you need. The longer those conversations typically last, the more it affects your bottom line.

Those basic two metrics - call volumes and average handling time - have been the core metrics contact centers have focused on for decades. When organizations want to reduce call center costs, they look there first.

But we know reducing operating costs for a contact center can be a little more complicated than that. 

Those basic metrics only consider the labor costs of having people to address customer calls. They don’t reveal the hidden costs that can sometimes be difficult to measure in a contact center. You need to measure the root cause for long calls or high volumes in order to reduce them without worsening the customer experience. 

Focusing on just those two areas can cause you to neglect to monitor the other things can drive costs as well: Compliance problems, fraud, unnecessary business expenses or credits authorized, and inefficient agents who don’t solve problems and result in repeated contacts.

At Tethr, we’re introducing a more intuitive way to measure potential contact center savings using the newest developments in artificial intelligence. 

We want our customers to clearly see and capture potential savings. So we’re putting everything related to reducing contact center costs in one dashboard, which includes specific, detailed analytics. 

These updates show you the actual cost impact of different activities on your dashboards - giving you automatically updated guidance for how to cut costs. 

3 ways the new Tethr cost dashboards help you reduce costs 

Reduce call lengths + volumes

When Tethr analyzes your calls and chats, you’ll see more than just your basic average handling time and call volumes. We automatically examine your contact center analytics for real cost drivers that you can easily take action to prevent. This shows you the root cause of long calls or repeated contacts, so you know the source of your problems. 

When you look on your dashboard, you’ll be able to instantly answer 

• What areas do my self-service channels fail?
• What issues drive customers to have to contact us repeatedly? 
• What reasons do my agents give when they ask customers to call back? 
• Which agents and issues spur the most transfers and misdirected calls? 
• Is my automated attendant training/IVR working to prevent misdirected calls? 
• Are there any preventable, negative behaviors that extend my call times? 

Optimize your labor 

Companies spend millions trying to ensure contact center agents meet QA standards and compliance requirements. But there’s an easier, less expensive way. Our new cost dashboard puts that into focus. 

When you use a conversation intelligence platform to monitor your conversations, you can conduct call monitoring for QA automatically, at scale, while increasing your sample size to 100%. This allows you to reduce manual labor time spent auditing calls, giving your agents the ability to focus on more valuable analysis. 

Reduce business expenses 

How often do your contact center agents' behaviors and actions have cost implications? Many times adding a procedural step can improve your financial health.

We can work with your team to teach Tethr to measure some common cost drivers specific to your business. This helps detect what happens in conversations and ensure you’re maximizing business outcomes.

Here’s some examples of the questions we help answer, so our customers can drive down costs: 

• Are agents offering paperless billing as an option? Are some agents doing this more than others?
• Are agents troubleshooting before they send out a technician? 
• Are agents giving discounts or account credits? Are some teams or agents doing this more than others? What situations happened that prompted them to make the offer? 

Interested in seeing the new cost-driven dashboards? Schedule a call with our team of experts.

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