I am easily bored.

I like to have something to do almost every minute of the day. Sitting around doing nothing quickly makes me bored and just a bit irritable. When my To-Do List is done, I’m not entirely sure what to do with the extra 10 minutes.

Same thing happens at work. When things get slow, my enthusiasm wanes. I find myself watching the clock…a lot. As soon as I get a big project, I’m back on my feet and ready to go, no longer thinking about how many minutes until I can go home.

How often do your agents get stuck in “clock watching” mode? When they’re doing the same thing all the time, and have a lot of lag time between tasks, it’s easy to want to watch the clock. Plus, it’s difficult to stay focused, happy and productive.

Take their minds off the clock with productivity-boosting technology. Use dialing technology to keep agents busier and focused on collecting debt, not on the clock.  Below are three suggestions on how to do it.

1. Focus your agents’ time on the most lucrative, high balance calls. Keep your agents talking and collecting on the best accounts by using both predictive dialing and IVR messaging technology.

• Predictive dialers keep agents consistently talking with a minimal wait time between calls, so they just concentrate on talking and collecting. When an answering machine is detected, have the dialer leave an automated call-back message; the dialer can do it just as well as an agent, and it frees up your agents to talk to live contacts.
• When leaving a message is sufficient, use IVR Messaging instead of your agent. IVR Messaging is great for reminder calls or any kind of routine calling, as well as for collecting low balance accounts and scrubbing lists for wrong numbers or bad numbers. Your agents can then concentrate on making the calls that collect the most money.

2. Center training on what agents are saying and best practices. Concentrate on training all your agents to be as successful as your best agent. Use monitoring and coaching technology to help them improve their collecting skills, both in real-time and for future calls.

• Monitoring, coaching and conferencing are ideal for training agents on the fly or for handling difficult situations. Listen to agents’ calls live and interject when it’s necessary. You can set up the system so that only the agent can hear you helping them on the line, or select conference mode and everyone can chat together.
• Training is easier when you have a record of what your agents are actually saying. Use call recordings to listen to what your best agents are doing, and then teach your other agents to do the same thing.

3. Keep agents talking to the most productive accounts; don’t be afraid to change it up! Use your dialing technology to assign each agent the types of accounts that best fit their skill set. When a list isn’t performing the way you’d hoped, quickly change your lists and try something new.

Use these suggestions to keep your agents busy collecting and not busy watching the clock.

Done with this blog post!

Is it time to go home yet?

  by Kendra Fugal, Marketing & Communications Coordinator, IAT              

Categories: Guest Blogs, NL Insider

Tags: IVR messaging, messaging technology, predictive dialer, productivity, training