The Wrap-Up Time Trap: How Automation and Business Intelligence Boost Agent Efficiency
Chief Marketing Officer
Long wrap-up times after calls are a critical pain point for many contact centers. Staffing shortages and high agent turnover make meeting production goals a constant battle. Short-duration calls clog up productivity and push agents to unnecessarily long wrap-up times.
Many have turned to automation and analytics to improve agent performance and main an exceptional customer experience. Automation relieves agents of repetitive tasks like disconnected calls and hang-ups so they can focus on complex issues and deliver a better customer experience. Analytics uses data to identify and offer suggestions for correcting bottlenecks in wrap-up processes.
It’s becoming more crucial than ever to address these primary issues head-on – keep reading to find out how you can do just that.
How TCN’s Performance Analytics & Reporting boosts agent efficiency
Let’s dive into an example of how an actual TCN client enhanced agent efficiency while saving thousands in production hours on short-duration calls.
By leveraging TCN’s business intelligence tools, Performance Analytics and Reporting, this contact center identified a hidden productivity drain: excessive wrap-up time on short-duration calls. Collaborating with a team of 126 agents, TCN halved the wrap-up time for calls under 15 seconds, reducing it from an average of 63.4 seconds to 31.7 seconds. This resulted in a significant monthly savings of $18,150, or approximately 726 full-time equivalent (FTE) hours.
$25 (agent wage) x 726 (hours saved) = $18,150 (monthly savings)
Imagine if just eight agents adjusted their mindset regarding short-duration calls and wrap-up times. By reducing their time to the new 30-second goal from their current 63.4 seconds, they’d collectively save nearly 34 FTE hours per month, translating to $850 in monthly savings.
$25 (agent wage) x 34 (hours saved) = $850 (monthly savings)
While the cost savings are impressive, consider the broader impact. Reducing wrap-up time frees up agents to handle more calls, improving overall productivity and customer satisfaction. Additionally, this approach fosters a data-driven culture, empowering agents to optimize their own performance.
4 reasons why agents get stuck in wrap-up and how to boost agent efficiency
Every contact center has unique goals, and wrap-up time management is no exception. Let’s explore four common reasons why agents spend too much time in wrap-up and ways to reduce after-call work.
- Underestimation of impact
Agents may inadvertently squander precious minutes on unnecessary tasks or prolonged note-taking without recognizing the larger impact of these actions. In the example above, a client found savings of $18,150 in FTE hours over one month. These types of insights sometimes go unnoticed and don’t always reflect the true impact they can have.
While agents may view wrap-up tasks as routine administrative duties, the cumulative effect of excessive wrap-up can be staggering, leading to a significant loss in overall efficiency and production hours over time.
Discussing the consequences of extended wrap-ups, such as missed opportunities (e.g., inbound and outbound sales or debt collection opportunities), with your agents can show a level of transparency into business operations. Building trust in the organization. - Unintentional gaming of the system
Although this is frowned upon in the contact center industry, in some cases, agents may engage in unintentional gaming of the system, inadvertently prolonging wrap-up time to avoid being immediately assigned to another interaction. While not always malicious in intent, this behavior can harm overall efficiency and customer satisfaction. It can also have unintended consequences on team and agent morale.
Address this by fostering a team environment and emphasizing the impact on overall customer satisfaction. - Inefficient processes
Beyond individual behavior, inefficient processes and outdated technology can also contribute to prolonged wrap-up time. Cumbersome manual data entry, complex CRM systems or inadequate training on new tools can impede agents’ ability to wrap up calls and transition to the next interaction swiftly.
Invest in user-friendly tools, like TCN’s highly-rated call center software platform, and provide clear training for agents to navigate wrap-up tasks efficiently. - Quality vs. quantity
There’s a delicate balance between efficiency and quality service. While optimizing wrap-up time for maximum productivity, it’s equally crucial to ensure that agents have sufficient time to effectively provide quality service and address customer needs. Striking the right balance requires a nuanced approach to prioritizing both efficiency and customer satisfaction.
The root cause of agent efficiency and the challenges associated can vary by business, but the primary objective is to help agencies help their agents succeed. By understanding these challenges and implementing solutions, you can create a win-win situation for both agents and your business.
The automation advantage
In today’s competitive business landscape, delivering exceptional customer service while maintaining operational efficiency is crucial. This guide explores how TCN’s suite of powerful tools, including Performance Analytics, Voice Analytics and Click2Pay, can empower your contact center to achieve both.
- Performance Analytics
Data is the lifeblood of any successful contact center, guiding decisions that optimize performance and customer satisfaction. TCN’s Performance Analytics and Reporting solution goes beyond basic analytics to provide actionable insights that can transform your operations.
The information gathered through business intelligence can lead to discovering top-performing agents, faulty practices, compliance risks and service issues. It can show how your contact center is performing and reveal productivity gaps and customer satisfaction levels. These are insights that can make or break your contact center.
Automate the gathering, organizing and analyzing of data with easy-to-configurable dashboards to save your contact center time and money. - Voice Analytics and AI-Generated Call Summaries
Gone are the days of manually sifting through call recordings. TCN’s Voice Analytics solution leverages AI to empower confident decision-making and streamline agent workflows. Search, transcribe, filter and automate call flagging for further review. TCN’s transcription works with English, Spanish, French and Indian dialects.
AI-generated call summaries automatically provide a quick, accurate summary of conversations and can be used for actionable insights. These summaries are crucial to helping automate after-call work.
By streamlining call analysis and automating repetitive tasks, Voice Analytics frees up valuable agent time and empowers data-driven decision-making. - Click2Pay
Traditionally, completing a payment for your contact center involved cumbersome steps, including transferring customers to external payment portals or manually inputting payment details. This not only prolonged interactions but also introduced friction in accepting payments.
Enter Click2Pay and IVR payments — a seamless payment solution integrated directly into the contact center. With Click2Pay, agents can initiate transactions with a simple click, eliminating the need for customers to navigate external payment gateways. Whether by phone call, chat or email, agents can generate payment links, facilitating real-time frictionless transactions.
Drive agent efficiency with automation and business intelligence
TCN’s cloud-based contact center software platform has transformed organizations worldwide by automating tasks and collecting more payments while keeping agents productive and happy.
Check out this page to learn more about how TCN’s business intelligence solution, Performance Analytics, can help you confidently navigate the complexities of automation, productivity and wrap-up time while you focus on delivering quality experience to agents and consumers.