Best Practices - Email Notifications

The purpose of Call Centre Best Practices is for managers to be able to improve the call centre productivity and efficiencies. Productivity and efficiency improvements begin with the agents. By following best practices for each application the call centre improvements will happen.  The best practices will help you run an effective inbound, outbound or blended call centre.

This is an enewsletter copy of the Best Practices for Agent Desktops.  Visit the Spectrum website or SlideShare for the full version.

Email – What we would ever do without it today.  For those of us old enough to remember doing business without email we are very thankful for this communications method.  In the past we would call in or wait until we arrive at the office to find out all of the good or bad news.  When we received our stack of telephone messages or messages from the boss we did not know if this was urgent or just checking in.

Email over the years has changed and improved.  Some of the changes are welcome, Emails to smartphones, and some of the changes, spam, are not so welcome.  Fortunately we can quickly see what spam is and stop it from occurring. But there are emails that we need to see if the reasons for the message are relevant. 

Email notifications can be in multiple formats.  Best Practices recommend keeping your email notifications limited to key information, critical information and data that will help you improve your performance.

• Daily and Weekly Notifications with performance data
• Advanced Threshold alerts
• Subject line data
• Key people only for emails

Daily and weekly notifications that include overall performance data are the email notifications that mobile managers should be receiving.  The business goals and targets that you are looking to stay aware of are the ones that you should be receiving.  It is not a best practice to state which data you should be receiving because each business is unique.

The amount of data in the email is your decision.  The layout of the data should be from most important, at the top, to least important at the bottom. The overall look of the email layout is your decision.  It could also be based on if you are reading this email primarily on your smartphone.

Advanced threshold alerts or combined threshold alerts are the only threshold emails that should be sent.  Imagine getting an email every time there is a call waiting. Instead use an advanced or combined threshold setting.  For example: There is a call waiting, it has been waiting for 30 seconds and there are agents available for that group.  At that point go ahead and send a message to the group supervisor.  The email alert can be triggered based off of other singular level threshold violations if they are truly critical to the business.

The email alerts are a business decision.  The objective is to be aware of conditions while you or other key people are away from the business.  As a manager you are under constant pressure to improve the contact center. Yet you are required to attend remote meetings and can lose track of the status of the operations.  Having threshold alerts sent to you allows you to remotely react quickly.

The importance of reacting is to be sure you are doing so only when the conditions are at the level that requires your intervention.

Receiving an email that has data in the subject line will save you time. As an example if we were to receive an email alert from a combined KPI threshold alert and the information were in the subject line we would not have to open the email, read it and then respond.  If we are aware of the conditions that will cause this email we now know something critical is going on back in the office. We can then check in to find out what is causing this problem.

The email may also be a daily message showing you overall performance. But to you there is a single key item that you want to know about.  That piece of data can be the subject line. The subject line could be Sales revenue for the day, call volume, tickets opened, total talk time or total abandoned calls.  The choice of the subject line data is yours to make.

Emails should be sent to the people that will respond to them or need to be aware of the content of the email.  Emails should not be sent just to give out information.  If the receiving person is not going to do anything with the information they have received then they should not have the email sent to them.

Outsourcing companies at times send emails providing daily and / or weekly results of key statistics.  What is nice about this approach is the email is coming directly from the reporting package software and is therefore real time, accurate and is sent out on time.

Emails can be very helpful to a dynamic call center.  If your business has you mobile often then email notifications and alerts are a best practice to follow. Spectrum is a leading provider of Unified Contact Center Reporting.  Contact Spectrum today to discuss best practices.  For more examples of reporting visit our website and the products page. http://www.specorp.com/products

Follow Spectrum Corporation:

• SlideShare
• LinkedIn
• Blog

Dan Boehm
VP Sales and Marketing
Spectrum
dboehm@specorp.com
+1 713 986 8839