Ready to see what a highly efficient Care team can accomplish?
You already spend a lot of time configuring the appropriate priorities and routing rules to have conversations filtered and sorted. It’s a part of your job to optimize your agent's queues to meet SLAs for responding to and resolving customer issues. Why not automate some of that process?
By enabling this push-next queue configuration option, you can better control the conversations that are available to agents and ensure that all users receive a response in a timely manner.
Push-next is a powerful tool to prioritize inbound items and help create a steady pace for your agents. Using this queue option hides the “available queue” and prevents agents from reviewing conversations before claiming them, ensuring that conversations are responded to in the prioritized order you have set up.
As part of the team-level settings, you can define for routing for each of your customer care teams, improving your customer's experience and conversation resolution time by turning a manual process into simple automation.
Check out this short video to quickly understand the different types of queues.
Khoros Customer Success Story
Instant gratification dominates digital engagement, and customer support teams are on the front line. The job can be daunting, and in some instances, agents can cherry-pick issues from the available queue that look easy or that they have answered before in order to improve their TAR numbers. This can hinder the agent's performance growth, burn out other agents handling all the difficult conversations, and make your customers wait even longer.
It’s up to managers to equip agents with the right tools to take care of customers— including a conversation management strategy to represent the brand as well as they can. Efficiency is the name of the game in the digital contact center. The more efficient you are, your agents, customers, and leadership will be happier.
For example, a current Khoros Customer wanted to reduce the number of agent clicks throughout the day by automating their workflow. They took an eight-week snapshot of their care team’s performance metrics at the end of the year. Then, after onboarding a Push-Next configuration, they compared another eight weeks to the previous measurement.
They saw a 13% increase in agent efficiency throughout the weeks. This allowed agents to keep up with an influx of messages, peaking at 25.53 cases per second. You could save an average of 25 clicks a day per agent using push-next.
Proving immediate gains in productivity and efficiency.
The question you might ask yourself now is, “how do we know if this queue configuration will work for us?”
The first thing to understand is that Push-Next should help cut down/eliminate the "inactive time" accrued by agents. Inactive time accrues when there's work available in Assigned to Me, or Available, but the agent chooses not to take the following conversation, whether it’s because they're not ready or they're talking to a colleague.
In the case of customer experience, success starts when you understand your team’s performance baseline. A powerful tool in your arsenal is the Agent Performance widget which can give you a complete view of Agent or Team performance.
We recommend including the following metrics:
- Utilization shows what percentage of the agent’s work time is true "helping customers" time.
- Response and Average Response Handle Time shows the total number of responses sent by an agent and how much time an agent spent viewing a conversation before a response has been sent (response handle time).
- In-focus and Out-of-focus Active & Inactive Time
- In-focus time is an agent's time looking at the Khoros tab.
- Out-of-focus time is the amount of time an agent spends looking at another tab that is not Khoros.
- Inactive time is the amount of time an agent spent with no conversation in view in the agent tab when there were conversations available for them to take action on (i.e., not working when they're supposed to)
- Active time is the time an agent spent viewing a conversation in the agent tab.
- Team Performance
- To track volumes of responses vs. closed, as well as handle time.
- Can be used to quickly compare and identify underperforming agents.
Together, these metrics provide a holistic view to see average performance and identify over or underperforming agents.
For example, If you see an agent who’s accruing unusual amounts of Responses Assisted, this could indicate that they are “cherry picking” by deciding not to respond to the more difficult conversations they are assigned.
Not sure if Push-Next is suitable for your team?
Here are a few questions you should consider about implementing Push-Next
- How much do you want to depend on your agents to decide what is important?
- When configured optimally, your agents should predominantly be routed to conversations that need to be responded to.
- How much do your agents decide on how to structure their workday
- You can calculate Utilization very robustly using Agent Activities and Agent States metrics.
- Would you and your agents like to try a pilot program for a Push-Next configuration?
- The pilot program setup process is simple to begin, complete, and compare.
- Customers will not be negatively affected during this trial.
- You should see immediate gains in productivity and efficiency.
Talk to your CSM about a Push-Next Configuration today!
Customers should review their Agent States when implementing Push Next. They may need to add more states to accommodate Push-Next or tweak which states should allow agent actions.
A key training point: Once Push Next is enabled, agents will either need to
- Close a conversation, or
- Click the X button in the top-right corner of the conversation view to "Clear" it (typically after sending a response to move the conversation to Pending), and then the next conversation will be pushed.
- Prior to Push-Next, the “Clear” functionality was more of a workflow option.
To learn more about Push-Next and other queue configurations, check out these resources below
