The AHT (Average Handling Time) in technical customer service has a significant impact not only on personnel costs but also on customer satisfaction. In particular, technical problems that are difficult for customers to understand and describe have a huge impact on the average handling time. How can companies improve their AHT? Especially in technical customer support, an innovative solution is needed here. We took a closer look at the reasons for too long AHT and a solution to improve it.
A customer service phone call can often drag on due to numerous individual reasons. One thing is certain, no matter what the reason: Every unnecessary second spent on the service hotline costs money and wears on the patience of customers and staff.
Customers usually contact customer service when problems arise. Often it is not comprehensible for those affected what the problem is and how it could be solved. After all, they would not otherwise ask the customer service for help.
The complexity of the request and layman's know-how lead to lengthy explanations on the part of the clients and to lengthy question and answer scenarios on the part of the staff. Often service agents have to ask questions several times or obtain information that customers do not have at hand in time or do not have at all. The conversation is thus unnecessarily drawn out.
Even the highest availability of customer service does not change the fact that the processing time of a customer concern can be protracted due to inefficient communication. If service staff first have to navigate through complex and possibly multiple applications to view all customer information and information on the cause of the problem, this leads to frustration on both sides.
Customer satisfaction is one of the most important metrics in companies, but customer service requirements are changing rapidly. Find out more now!
In addition to the above three reasons that can cause a long Average Handling Time, there are other factors that need to be considered. For one, untrained or new customer service staff may be insecure and may need more time or certain training in advance to handle customer queries. At the same time, the reasons for excessive AHT should consider the quality of support provided and the information or reason for the concern. This is because each company evaluates a positive or negative AHT on the basis of individual criteria.
As previously mentioned, unnecessary questions often result from the fact that service employees do not have all the information at a glance, which could usually be easily derived from the customer data. In addition, especially in the case of technical problems on the part of the customer, customer service is usually unable to see what the problem is. This slows down the dissolution process and has a significant impact on increasing AHT.
Reducing AHT while maintaining or even improving the quality of customer service is often a challenge for companies. Conntac has therefore made it its business to create a solution for this challenge. An innovative self-service app for customers, with which technical problems can be solved independently. If complex problems require additional support from customer service, service staff can view technical details of the individual problem in the corresponding dashboard.
On the one hand, this means that the service hotline is not unnecessarily burdened with incoming telephone calls about actually trivial problems that can be solved independently and 24/7. On the other hand, service staff can use the newly gained capacities to offer sufficient support for complex concerns. The dashboard for agents and managers facilitates transparency in the resolution process and ensures that unnecessary questions and thus long waiting times are avoided. Viewing historical customer and hardware information speeds up the troubleshooting process enormously.
Did you already know? With the Conntac Self-Service solution, you can process incoming support requests up to 70% faster.
Excessive average handling time should be monitored and investigated throughout as it is an indication of both planning and process errors. Nevertheless, it should be noted that each company's AHT is inevitably different due to individuality and the possible use of appropriate software.
With automated and situation-specific answers - around the clock - you relieve your service staff enormously. This allows free time capacities to devote to more complex concerns in customer service. If employees are able to view additional information on complicated requests in the service dashboard, they are able to process them more quickly. This real win-win situation ensures an outstanding customer and employee experience and, in addition, companies can avoid high costs in customer service.
