Reduce the cost and complexity of a full-fledged contact center without losing call reporting visibility.
A customer calling one of your brick-and-mortar stores remains on hold for 25 minutes before hanging up and contacting a more attentive competitor. Without visibility into your inbound call traffic, you may or may not realize this is even happening.
If your organization has Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) but has chosen not to deploy contact center software because of agent licensing costs or system complexity, the trek inbound callers make to your business, and any hurdles they encounter along the path, could be a significant blind spot for your company. And the results could be staggering in terms of lost sales, lost customers, negative experiences, and a hit to your reputation.
And this can be true whether you are a retailer, a financial services company, a government agency, or a healthcare institution.
But there is a way CUCM customers can secure complete call visibility without incurring contact center costs or intricacies. One that delivers valuable contact center-type information that can be accessed and used, including:
- Cradle-to-grave call tracking
- Number of callers in queue
- Average and maximum queue times
- Abandoned call counts and percentages
- Number of agents available to take calls
- Agents currently taking hunt group calls
- Hourly traffic summaries
The answer lies in the robust capabilities of Native Call Queuing (NCQ).
When using NCQ in a hunt group application, organizations gain visibility into inbound customer interactions, eliminate customer experience blind spots, and are better able to manage workflows and agent resources.
A hunt group and Native Call Queuing primer
A hunt group is a standard CUCM capability that allows an enterprise to distribute calls to a predefined group of agent extensions, enabling automated call distribution without costly contact center infrastructure.
For example, service calls can be routed to the service hunt group and then presented to individual agents in this group based on a range of business rules such as broadcast, longest idle, circular/round robin, or top-down values. An advanced CDR reporting and analytics solution captures, details, and reports on traffic passing through the hunt group and hunt group agents. Such statistics can include call counts, ring times, abandoned or answered call status, and answering agent.
NCQ builds on CUCM’s core hunt group functionality, providing additional business value which can prove significant over time.
With NCQ enabled, callers waiting to speak with an available agent are held in queue. This queueing information allows advanced reporting platforms to report additional historic and real-time metrics about the caller experience. This includes queued call counts and queue times, such as the oldest call in queue, and average, minimum, and maximum queue times. Additionally, real-time agent states such as logged out, ready, ringing, and talking, as well as the caller ID of the call being handled, can be viewed.
Identify problems, act in real-time
Organizations can actively monitor hunt group agent performance and productivity against defined KPIs. Individual managers can configure dashboards the way they want to immediately spot hunt group related problems – the number of calls in queue, number of available agents, longest queue times, and current agent status – and take corrective action to improve caller experiences and reduce abandoned calls.
On-demand reports give insights into call activity
On-demand reports can be generated with just a couple of mouse clicks. From high level summaries of group activity to time-of-day reports and agent call detail reports, organizations can capture daily, weekly, or monthly call trends at a granular level. In addition, transferred call path reports provide complete cradle-to-grave call journey information to gauge the entire hunt group-fueled customer experience.
Native Call Queuing. Contact center-like capabilities without the contact center. More call visibility. For less money. And an end to contact center complexity. Learn more here.
