Tips To Lower Your Call Center's Handle and Talk Time

00:00Tom Lair, you've heard me breakdown I'm up here, you've heard me break down contact center technology on the podcast time and time again, now it's time for me to help you with your challenges. your challenges. As your contact center technology advisor through our new company, Expivia Digital, I can help you with things like CCaaS selection, any type of AI implementation, and nice studio and integration services. It's the same honest advice you hear on the geek applied specifically to your operation. Visit ExpiviaDigital.com to get started. That's ExpiviaDigital.com. This is it. I Like this guy, not only is he the CEO of Expivia Interaction Marketing Group, and the call center geek himself, Tom Laird. Welcome back everybody to another episode of Expivia Interaction Marketing Group. The call center-center and contact-contact-center to give you some actionable items you could take back into your contact center, improve the overall quality, improve your agent experience, improve the customer experience as well.

01:17My name, I'm Tom Laird, I am the Expevia Interaction Marketing. Expevia is a 600 seat, wow, that's crazy to even be able to say now, we've grown so much. 600 seat call center outsourcer located here in Erie, Pennsylvania. I have to laugh and I chuckled a little bit here in my opening. This is aboutocre. This is about the eighth time I've done that opening. You guys are going to hear it once, but I've done it eight times, just couldn't get it out. And then when I did, I did a full episode. I did this episode like five minutes ago, did the whole 17, 18 minutes, and then came up with like four or five things of things that popped in my head right at the end that I just didn't want to throw in at the end, so I deleted it and I'm starting over. So this should be an awesome episode because I'm doing it over.

02:00so it's kind of funny, I guess it's Friday and that's kind of the mood my brain is in. Alright, but let's get into this, not to bore you guys, but I wanna talk about handle time and how to lower it, talk time, handle time, right? How do we get that down in our contact centers? What are some tips that I can give, right? Some real actionable kind of plays, right? That you can take back when this is over ritical. And go implement to hopefully improve the cost per call, right? In SMS texting community, the advice from a call center, geek texting community, which again, I implore all of you to join. There's over 200 members right now. So if you have not just text call center to 814-2470366. and you're not gonna get bombarded with text and never sell. It's all content related to the contact center.

02:51If you have any questions, you have a direct access to me. It's literally, it's my text number, right. So I see everything. I can respond, one-on-one back to you, or I can respond back to the group. But this came from the community. And again, the question was how do we So, to get into this, let's talk about the difference between handle and talk time, right? So, handle time is the entire cradle to grave time period that a call was handled, right? So the time that the agent picked it up, started talking to a customer all the time that's- in the middle there, the time that can be your talk time, that- that can be your mute time, that can be your hold time, and then it can be the after call work time as well. So all that time added-up to the point where they're ready to take another call is really the handle time, right?

03:44Talk time is just the- the time of period that they're really talking- talking to a- to a customer, right? So and obviously then your hold time, you- you kinda get what that is. So the first thing that I like to do, when I see a- a trend upwards of our overall handle time is to break the calls down down, right, and I'll pull a report that shows my talk time, it'll show my hold time after call work time. We can look on speech analytics and see how much silence is happening is happening is happening is happening is happening is happening is happening is happening is happening. For example, obviously if we see a lot of hold time, I think hold time should be almost zero. I get irritated in my center if we have a program that is above five seconds of hold time on average.

04:37I think hold time is a, you know there and there a lack of training right or there's there's different types of calls that are now in that we weren't ready for right there kind of a red flag and it's one of the biggest determines the customer experience. So you want to make sure that your whole time is as low as you possibly can get it and if it's not you gotta find out what you need to train or what you need to work on on. biggest tips. It's obvious, but it's a lot of work so people just put their head in the sand and they don't look at it. The. The other thing we can actually look at mute time-time with our phone system, right? And looking at speech analytics, how much silence time is happening. And that's kind of the same. I kind of correlate those two with mute.

05:18And then the number one enemy of handle time, right? Other than your whole time is your after call work. After call work, there's a lot of layers to enraptor the onion, right? to trying to peel some of those back. So number one is are you making your reps be an after call work? Meaning is there excessive memoing and excessive work that has to be done on an account, on a Salesforce screen, on a Zendesk screen, and your CRM done, right? We're gonna dig more into that when I, kinda break these calls down here in a second. But that's one way, are you doing that? All right, second of all, on the flip side is the rep doing it, right? Are you constantly having to struggle a call center, you know, I don't know, it's a pain in the rear, right? It's been an age old problem, you know, make sure that you have a phone system or you're looking at your phone system to say, okay, you know, you know what. On average, my reps only need 15 seconds of after co-work and guys, you know what, they need a little bit, right?

06:12They need to be able to at least take a breath or two. Right before they move on to the next call. So I'm not saying you should have zero. But for us, we normally set it at 15 seconds and under. [QA coverage remark omitted] And literally, they can go available, right? Or at 15 seconds, our phone system is automatically gonna put them back in. Some of it's eight seconds, some of it's 30 seconds, you know, it all depends. But make sure you're trying to do whatever you can from a technology standpoint to limit your after-call work. All right, so let's say that you've broken all that down. After-call work's good, Tom. These reps are highly trained.

06:52Something's going on, right? So if you think it's not a, I don't want to say a rep issue, that's not fair, but something to do with a human, right, in the actions that we're taking, then we have to look at what you're doing from a process standpoint of your actual phone call. So if I think we have a phone issue or a program issue, what I like to do is then break the calls down, right? So we'll listen to a bunch of calls and then we'll whiteboard it. And I'm going to keep this super simple, but I think you'll get the point. So let's say we have an intro, right, or verification piece, right, to a call. And then maybe there's an opening, and actually it's probably the opening first and then the intro or verification. So let's say it's that opening, intro, verification, then we have an issue handling and resolution.

07:40Maybe there's a cross-sell, up-sell. There's a memo-ing piece, right, that we have to do and that's kind of part of your after-call work. All right, so that's our customer service 101 phone call that we're taking. So the first thing I'm going to tell you to do is when you're talking about, and again, we'll talk about the greeting here or the opening here in a second, but technology can either really hurt you here or it can really help you. So when you're talking about an intro and you're talking about a verification piece, how many of you are still doing this where you're asking your customer for account information in the IVR, right? So you want their social security number, you want their account number, you want some piece of qualifying information on them, and then when they get to the rep, the rep's asking for it again.

08:26So that's a double whammy on talk time, and the obvious piece of this is yes, the rep now needs to ask for that information again, and they're going to enter all that information. So that's probably another 25 seconds that you could have, maybe 20 seconds of talk time that you could have taken off right there. But you know what happens and it happens all the time is every other call, the customer actually asks why they have to do that again. You know, hey, rep XYZ, I just gave all this information in the IVR. Why am I telling it to you again? So right there, that was about six seconds, right? Then the rep has to respond, yeah, we're very sorry, ma'am, you know, there's been a problem with that coming over to us, so we just want to re-verify it or whatever kind of of lie that you're going to give the customer because that's kind of what you're doing because you know that it's never come over, right? It was always something that IT wanted to do, right? But they never got to get one of those. So no, I get it. I know it. I've been there lived it. So that's a huge piece, right? Is your is your technology from a verification standpoint helping or hurting you? You can do a lot with talk time when it comes to that the opening right please don't have this very robust annoying opening right where you say something like and this is not going to be very eloquent but thank you for calling X I love to use XYZ today I guess but thank you for calling XYZ bank where your service is our priority and we try to do what we can for our customers or you know something like that one of those tag lines it's annoying customers don't really care about it they just want problem solved and really all it does is kind of irritate a customer although you know someone in marketing is probably feeling better because you know they're trying to get that message out right to to all the customers. So again I think from a from a handle time perspective from a customer experience you should keep it simple keep it right to the point thank you for calling XYZ bank my name is Tom how can I help you today that's it done right build a little bit of report make sure you have your name out there but don't go into this long-winded thing again we just just saved another six and a half seconds. Okay, now when we get to the issue handling, if we see that and we're listening to calls, and there's a ton of questions that we're not ready for, right, we need to obviously make sure that we're going to look to train some of that, I would also say have some type of KMS that you start to build right knowledge management system, there's a lot of very inexpensive ones out there, that you can start to input questions, right, and And you can search.

10:55If a rep can't know every thing, but they need some support and help as well. If there are some vague questions, you can start to add 3 or 4 or 5 into your KMM. And you start to build this awesome huge repository of questions and answers. And then when those things come in, you don't have to say, can you please hold MAM, wait for a supervisor. really doesn't know the answer. So then they go into their tool to find the answer, tell you, and again, they're on hold now for 38 seconds. Big deal. Alright, so again, I would say a knowledge management system, even if you have some basic things, is a really important and really cool tool. When it comes to cross-sell, up-sell, I will tell you cross-sell and up-sell, I'm all for it, right? As long as they're done the right way and, you know, the product kind of somewhat matches the type of call that's coming in and it's not off the wall, all right, that's a whole another probably topic and podcast.

11:56But I would say from make sure that the cross on upsell is working from a conversion standpoint. There's so many organizations that we have seen that just have had this legacy product that they try to sell at the end. It doesn't convert and really it only ends up costing the organization money because it's adding another 45 seconds of handle time or 30 seconds of handle time to the actual call. longer, obviously your cost per call is going up. So again, make sure that it's worth it. And sometimes it is worth it, right? You want a longer handle time to make sure that we're getting that cross-selling upsell because it's so profitable. So sometimes, you know, a longer handle time is actually gonna make you money because they're doing a good job on that cross-seller upsell. All right, so then, you know, we kind of have our close, right, you're always gonna ask the customer if there's anything else that they can help you with, right, so you don't wanna take that off.

12:48I've seen people kind of take that type of ending off because they just want to wrap the call up, which is crazy because customer experience trumps should trump everything. And then we get to our best friend, after call work. So a couple of ways that we can make after call work as low as we possibly can. The main thing that when reps, when they're done with calls, they need to do some work. And a lot of that comes with memoing. So memoing your Salesforce, memoing your Zendesk on what actually happened. So there's ways that you can auto memo, right? That you have a kind of a program that takes everything that happened and all the keystrokes that you did and kind of just fills out and sees that the customer's name was changed and the address was updated, right? And we put that into that auto memo field.

13:37A lot of times you don't have that though, right? And you need to memo yourself or the rep needs to memo themselves. So the biggest way to save time here is to make sure that you have a good kind of acronym dictionary, right? So maybe customer isn't customer, it's C or C-U. Account is A-C or A-C-T, right? Something like that, that you can make paragraphs that a rep might need to type out as short as a half a sentence, right? Just make sure that everybody's using the same terminology, right, I've seen that a lot too, where rep A is using C-U and rep B is using CUST for customer, right? It gets confusing and your higher ups will get annoyed when they have a customer issue and they can't really understand it. So you need to train that, you need to pull reps, you know, kind of train it and then have a little, kind of a little dictionary right to the, you know, with them, at least at the beginning that they can see maybe hanging in their station or at home or a little post it to make sure that they understand, you know, what the proper terminology that you guys are using are.

14:43That's a big way to make sure that you're lessening your after-co-work. The other ways we kind of talked about is just program it out, right? You can program it out to make sure that if it's 14 seconds or if it's 13 seconds or if you think it's eight seconds, whatever it is, give your rep a breath and then we gotta go. All right, you can also look, you know, really at your occupancy as well, right? So occupancy is another number that's gonna tell you how efficient you are And if maybe we have longer after call works or if we have some issues that are not in that talk time, not in that kind of revenue producing period or kind of helping period, depending on what type of call center you have, for me, it's revenue producing, especially if we're talking by the minute, right? And we wanna be efficient to a certain number, a 70%, 75% of our time needs to be in that, in that talk time kind of area.

15:38So if we're not, that's another kind of red flag to what's going on with our after call worker or those types of things. So again, I guess that's kind of my tips. I think it's just important that you kind of look at each piece of your calls if you think you have issues. I will tell you, 90% of the time it's training and it's educating your reps to not put people on hold, to have them just be able to talk through all those issues instead of having to look for them or get a supervisor on the phone. That's your number one issue with handle time. Number two issue is after call work. Number three is not having the proper verification greeting in your opening at the beginning. If you can kind of make sure that your reps are totally trained properly, that the new types of calls that are coming in, your training, that you're handling your wrap time, your after call work, your auto memoing, you're doing whatever you can for there and then programming them to get back in.

16:39and then your verification, you're opening, you shorten up as much as you possibly can. I mean, you guys can take 25 to 30, 45 seconds off of calls if you really streamline the process of all that and train that stuff all the way through. So again, I hope this can kind of save you some money. I hope you can take some extra calls, maybe don't need as much head count if you can implement some of these things. It's an important piece. I would just caution you, do not rush or really force lower handle times at the detriment to customer experience, right? If you have a call that takes eight minutes because you have to get through all these things and you wanna get it to six, it's probably not gonna happen, right? It could, but your customer experience is gonna really go down. Your CSAT scores, your NPS, your agent sentiment, your customer sentiment scores are gonna drop as well.

17:29So again, I hope that's helpful. I'd love to hear from you guys as well on some of the tips that you guys have to handle and kind of lower your handle time and your talk time. But hey, guys, just real quick here at the end, I'd love if you can please, if I have added any value to you whatsoever, if you can please go on and especially on iTunes, if you can post a review and kind of type what you like, what you don't like about the podcast, I would really appreciate it. Join the texting community, join that Facebook, Advice from a Call City Facebook community as well. Have a great weekend and I will, I'll talk to you guys all next week. I think next week we're gonna focus on calibration sessions and monitoring and using live calls versus recorded calls and kind of how that should all play out and give you some ideas on some of the things that we do and how we involve our reps in some of our quality and our client monitoring sessions.

18:22Have a good one guys, talk to you next week.