How To Reduce Call Wrap Up Time For Better Contact Center Productivity?

A ripple effect of which is that both start-ups and established brands have started looking ahead to come up with more customer-centric strategies. They have begun to pay attention to the challenges faced by their contact center agents and by the customers at the different touch points in the journey to deliver an enhanced user experience. 

One crucial challenge identified and vigorously worked on, when focusing on call centres, is Call Wrap up Time.

Call Wrap Up Time

As can be understood from the name, it is the time an agent spends on the tasks after a call with an aim to complete a customer interaction. Also called After Call Work or Post Call Processing, it implies the time a contact center agent invests in disposing the call, adding notes into a CRM, sharing the details with the respective team for follow up, send emails or SMS, toggling between systems to prepare for the next customer, talk to Manager, and so on.​

The average wrap up time can be calculated as:

Average wrap up time = (Total Handling Time – Total Hold Time – Total Talk Time)

                                                          Total Number of Calls Made

Now, when an agent is occupied with all these tasks, the consumer has to wait for the agent to be ready for listening to his queries. This, on one side, increases the customer on-hold time and lower down the consumer experience level. While, on the other side, shortening the Call Wrap up time can affect the quality of data entered or follow-up action. They either compromise on the quality of service they offer to complete the action on last call, or stay late on call wrap up affecting the call wait time for the consumer. Something that increases contact center expenses and affect the customer satisfaction level significantly, making it necessary for businesses and call centre authorities to take actions immediately.

But, the question that arises here is - What steps to take? How to ensure that both customers and call centre agents relish best moments? Let’s dive deeper into the call centre ecosystem and find some actionable steps here.

Proven Ways to Cut Down the Call Wrap Up Time

With an aim to bring more people on board and attend more calls, many contact centres overlook the training process. An outcome of which is that agents do attend the calls but often get confused in terms of how to close a call swiftly and effectively. Something that increases the time spent on a single call.

When the manager or senior agent shares their knowledge and tips with them, they find it easier to understand how to tackle the call wrap up process with each customer, how to answer their tricky questions and match up their expectations while focusing on closing a call at the earliest. This increases the chances of agents being able to close more call successfully every single day without getting drained out or confused.

It is necessary for agents to take notes during and after the call. When the contact center solution is integrated with CRM, it saves a lot of time toggling between the browser screens. CZ Bar is a C-Zentrix Call bar that is integrated with leading CRMs and saves a lot of toggle time during the call wrap time.

The foremost step you can invest your time, funds, and effort in is a high-accuracy speech-to-text engine that can convert the voice of customers on call to text for the agents to read. This becomes ever so important with the increasing pressure of maintaining the call wrap-up time. A speech-to-text API helps agents to read what a customer is saying making it easier to validate their understanding of the call and makes it easier for the agents to catch up the missing details anytime. This gives them freedom to get involved with the next call at the earliest, instead of wasting time on remembering and noting down all the details.

In most of the call centers, the agents make all the entries manually. However, when most of these tasks, if not all, are automated using some advanced call centre software and tools, the agents save more time. Simple tasks like filling up the caller’s details take up a lot of time and if automated this smoothens the internal process as well as make it easier for agents to attend the next call at the earliest. Something that reduces the call waiting time and increases customer satisfaction level. 

Another method to reduce the call wrap-up time and deliver a seamless customer experience is to invest in state-of-the-art technologies like AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP) based Bot. These technologies can help the call centers to speed up the whole process, by getting the regular calls attended by a bot and filtering only the crucial calls to the agents.

For example, a voice bot can attend multiple calls at the same time and feed the relevant information in real-time. When it finds any lead that can be converted or come across any question that it is not prepared for, it can transfer the call to live agents. Or better say, they filter the calls and make only a few approachable to the contact center agents. 

This makes it easier for the agents to get more positive results while saving time, effort, and cost.

Also with Speech analytics tool, there is possibility to automatically select the right disposition when the call is disposed. Another regular activity the agent does with call disposition is entering call texts. These call texts can be specific to call but there are some calls which are repetitive in nature. Such call texts can be inserted as notes which can be quickly copy-pasted by the agent. With a notes feature integrated in the agent screen, it saves call wrap time to some extent. Remember every second of the call wrap up time results in better productivity.

It has been found in most of the cases that agents get so drained out from back-to-back calls that they often feel fatigued. This slows down the whole process.

To overcome this situation, the best method a call center can invest in is to deliver better work culture experience to the agents. This includes taking steps like encouraging them to take tea breaks, giving them options like outdoor work (whenever possible), and more. As per FlexJobs, 86% of workers believe they would be less stressed if they had a flexible job

However, wrap-up time should be used only for wrap up activities and not for going on break or meeting etc. This will provide inaccurate data of average wrap up time.

Generally, the performance level of an employee is calculated based on the number of calls they attend in a single day. This creates a stress among call center agents to somehow meet their target numbers on a daily basis.

Now, here comes another challenge. 

There are different types of calls that an agent attends - right from the basic query calls to the complex grievance based calls, and more. Each of these calls demand a distinct time to be invested in. When a call center assess agents’ performance whilst overlooking this factor, the agents are either put into the category of ‘Under performers’ or they end up taking shortcuts to meet the numbers. Something that results in lower call quality in both the scenarios.

Now here, if a call center calculate the agent’s performance based on the nature of the call handled by them, they get a freedom to give their best into the call. This increases the chances of a customer getting better experience and eventually, add to business ROI.

Conclusion

Call wrap up time, a back-end process which is often hidden from a caller, brings the most drastic impact on the customer experience, efficiency level of call centers and associated ROI. So, it is a must for every associated call centre supervisor to try and reduce the call wrap up time by investing their time and efforts into the steps shared in this article.