One of the best things about a contact centre is its ability to provide customers with a seamless, multi-channel support experience, allowing them to reach out via phone, email, chat or other platforms, all while having access to their complete customer history for a personalised and efficient interaction, ensuring issues are resolved quickly and effectively. For reasons sometimes unknown, bad actors step into the frame, trying to ruin the relationship between companies and their customers, via the contact centre.
Relationship Destroyers
Who are these so-called “bad actors” in contact centres? There are many, and in most crime cases there are those that act intentionally and those that act recklessly and carelessly. Humans are fallible, and most contact centres will have a contact centre agent who can be open to manipulation, fooled by deceptive tactics into providing confidential information. Poor training and a lack of multi-factor authentication are common weaknesses fraudsters exploit. Cross-channel approaches involve multiple channels being interconnected as well as interactive, however it also means a simple product query on a company website gets an agent to access the customer’s previous history, escalating the query to another agent and suddenly doors are open to bad actors to take advantage, if customer identification has not been thoroughly verified.
Prevention is Better than Cure
Quite a few steps to protecting Contact Centres and their customers come at little cost. Often the answer lies in vigilance, training and monitoring, the steps most companies take when they care about protecting their customers, and their brand or company’s reputation. Additionally, vigilance to the alerts, and interpreting hidden dangers, is the sign of any good call supervisor or contact centre agent.
Red Flags
UC Advanced lays out some of the flags and warning signs that Contact Centres could encounter. A balanced approach should be taken, as often simple explanations can be at the root of many of the following call-alert situations.
Vishing (Voice phishing)
When a caller makes multiple requests to change sensitive information such as passwords, contact details or banking information in a short period. The caller is attempting to steal personal information by using social engineering tactics, pretending to be a representative from a bank or tech support, or imitating the person themselves.
Red Flags: Frequent requests for sensitive details, urgency to change information quickly, unusual phone numbers, or a caller asking for information that they should already have.
High Call Volume
High call volume can have simple explanations like seasonal demand spikes or be attributed to a successful marketing campaign. Alternatively, the unusual volume might be signalling service disruptions in certain areas or contact centre agents who have not logged in for work. The problem could be from within, such as poorly designed self-service options for the customers, that combined with a lack of readily accessible information on the company website, are leading customers to call for basic information, instead of finding answers themselves.
Red Flags: Significantly long wait times, high call rates and high call abandonment rates, frustrated agents, system crashes due to an overload, and a consistent inability to manage peak demand.
Long Queue Wait Times or Abandoned Calls
Missed customer calls, or calls where the customer has had to wait a long time before the call has been answered by an agent present several issues, including poor customer experience, lost revenue potential, damaged brand reputation, operational inefficiencies, and difficulty in accurately gauging customers’ needs.
Red Flags: Customer sentiment concerns, either by providing verbal feedback directly to the agent during a phone call or completing post-call surveys by leaving feedback through an online portal. Poor social media reviews can create havoc for a brand’s reputation. Inadequate staffing levels will often be the root cause of long wait times. However a system issue, such as a DDoS attack (distributed denial-of-service) deserves immediate attention.
Agent Performance Issues
Happy employees often equate to happy customers. However, a poorly trained agent, or a disgruntled employee, can be detected by a customer in their tone and attitude and issue resolution. Human agents are not machines, and their feedback is essential, so it is worth detecting what the underlying causes are, or replacing the agent, providing re-training and ensuring agents are following proper call scripts.
Red flags: A significant drop in key metrics like first call resolution (FCR), increased customer complaints, high agent absenteeism, rising turnover rates, declining customer satisfaction scores, noticeable changes in agent attitude, frequent errors in data entry, and a lack of engagement during coaching sessions;
all of which could point towards underlying problems like burnout, inadequate training, poor work environment or system malfunctions.
For those managing Contact Centres, and managers who have a vested interest in the welfare of their company and its reputation, paying attention to the alerts the system generates is a good start. Analysing why the system alerts are being generated is important, whether they are agent related, customer related or system related. Most of the time the alerts will be related to genuine causes for concern, and fixing the problems, or eliminating the bad actors, will keep companies healthy, wealthy and wise.
