Contact center agents are bogged down with hours of after-call work tasks, leaving less time to handle new calls. This not only drags down productivity but also ramps stress levels and can even push some of your best people to consider leaving.
Keeping things running smoothly and efficiently is a constant battle for call center managers.
One of the biggest headaches for call centers is the dreaded after-call work or ACW.
It’s a familiar drill: an agent finishes a call, and instead of jumping onto the next one, they’re stuck updating records, writing summaries, and scheduling follow-ups.
It’s essential work. Time spent on after-call work can accumulate, leading to longer customer wait times, higher operational costs, and a lot of frustration for everyone involved.
That’s where call summarization comes in to save the day.
A report on call centers revealed that agents are required to complete after-call activities within 6 minutes.
In this blog, we’ll explore call summarization, how it works, and its amazing benefits, which play an integral part in boosting customer satisfaction.
Understanding Call Summarization
Call summarization is a game-changer for call centers. It provides a way to document and review any customer interaction efficiently. At its core, call summarization involves using advanced technology to generate concise phone conversation summaries automatically.
Instead of manually typing out notes and key points from a call, agents can rely on these summaries to capture the essence of their interactions quickly and accurately.
Skip hours of manual typing by switching to AI-generated conversation summaries.
What are The Challenges of Manual Summarization?
Manual summarization comes with several challenges that can hinder the efficiency and effectiveness of call center operations.
Here are some key issues:
1. Time-Consuming
Agents spend significant time writing detailed summaries after each call, reducing the number of calls they can handle daily. This extended after-call work (ACW) can lead to longer customer wait times and lower overall productivity.
2. Inconsistency
Human-written summaries vary greatly in detail and quality, depending on the agent's note-taking skills and attention to detail. This inconsistency can make maintaining uniform records difficult and ensuring high-quality service.
3. Prone to Errors
Manual summarization is susceptible to human error. Important details might be omitted or inaccurately recorded, leading to potential misunderstandings and follow-up issues.
4. Agent Fatigue
Repeatedly summarizing calls can lead to agent burnout and fatigue, impacting customer relationship management, overall call center performance, and job satisfaction. The monotony of this task can also decrease morale and increase turnover rates.
5. Training and Onboarding
New agents need to be trained on how to summarize calls properly, which adds to their onboarding time. Even with training, a learning curve can affect the quality and speed of their summaries.
According to HubSpot, it takes new representatives an average of 3.2 months to reach full productivity.
6. Difficulty in Monitoring and Quality Control
Supervisors and quality assurance teams have a harder time monitoring and evaluating the quality of summaries. Inconsistent and error-prone summaries make it challenging to assess agent performance and identify areas for improvement.
7. Scalability Issues
As call volume increases, the manual summarization process becomes less scalable. More agents or additional resources might be required to handle the increased workload, leading to higher operational costs.
Results first, payment later.
What is The Importance of Summarization in Contact Centers?
Summarization in contact centers is a critical component that significantly impacts operational efficiency and customer satisfaction.
Let’s find out why is after call work important:
1. Enhanced Efficiency
Summarization helps streamline the after-call work (ACW) process. Automated or well-structured summaries allow agents to quickly complete post-call tasks, reducing the time spent on administrative work and enabling them to handle more daily calls.
2. Consistent Documentation
Accurate and consistent call summaries ensure that all interactions are recorded in a uniform manner. This consistency is crucial for maintaining high-quality service standards and for effective training and quality assurance processes.
3. Improved Customer Experience
Quick and precise summaries allow for faster follow-up actions and better issue resolution. When agents can access clear and concise records of previous interactions, they can provide more personalized and efficient service, enhancing the overall customer experience.
4. Data-Driven Insights
Summarization generates valuable data that can be analyzed to uncover trends, identify common customer issues, and improve service strategies. These insights can inform decision-making and help contact centers optimize operations and customer interactions.
5. Compliance and Risk Management
In many industries, maintaining accurate records of customer interactions is essential for regulatory compliance. Summarization ensures that all necessary details are captured, reducing non-compliance risk and protecting the organization from potential legal issues.
6. Training and Development
Summarized calls serve as useful training materials for new agents. They provide real examples of customer interactions, helping new hires understand best practices and learn how to handle various scenarios effectively.
7. Quality Assurance
Quality assurance teams rely on call summaries to evaluate agent performance and protocol adherence. Consistent and detailed summaries make it easier to conduct quality checks and provide constructive feedback to agents.
8. Workload Management
Summarization helps manage workloads better by reducing the manual effort required for documentation. This increases productivity and alleviates agent stress, increasing job satisfaction and lower turnover rates.
Leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) for Summarization
Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized how contact centers handle summarization tasks.
These advanced AI models bring numerous benefits, making the summarization process faster, more accurate, and more efficient.
Here's how LLMs can be leveraged for summarization in contact centers:
1. Automation and Efficiency
LLMs can automatically generate summaries of calls in real-time, drastically reducing after call work (ACW). By automating this process, agents can focus more on engaging with customers and handling more calls, thus boosting overall productivity.
2. Consistency and Accuracy
LLMs ensure that call summaries are consistent in format and content. They reduce human error by accurately capturing all essential conversation details, including customer issues, resolutions, and follow-up actions. This consistency is crucial for maintaining high-quality service and accurate record-keeping.
3. Natural Language Understanding
LLMs are trained on vast amounts of text data, enabling them to understand and process natural language accurately. This allows them to identify key themes, extract important details, and generate coherent summaries that reflect the call's content accurately.
4. Personalization
LLMs can be fine-tuned to adapt to a contact center's specific needs. This means they can be customized to focus on particular aspects of a conversation that are most relevant to the business, such as customer sentiment, product issues, or compliance-related details.
5. Scalability
As call volumes increase, the summarization workload can overwhelm human agents. LLMs can scale effortlessly to handle large volumes of calls without compromising on the quality or speed of the summaries. This scalability ensures that the summarization process remains efficient even during peak times.
6. Enhanced Customer Insights
By leveraging LLMs, contact centers can gain deeper insights into customer interactions. Summaries generated by LLMs can be analyzed to identify trends, common issues, and customer sentiments, providing valuable data that can inform decision-making and strategic planning.
7. Integration with Existing Systems
LLMs can be integrated with existing contact center systems, such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and ticketing systems. This seamless integration ensures that summaries are automatically updated in the relevant systems, improving workflow efficiency and data accuracy.
8. Continuous Learning and Improvement
LLMs can be continually trained and updated with new data, allowing them to improve over time. This continuous learning ensures that the models remain up-to-date with the latest trends, language nuances, and customer interaction patterns, further enhancing the quality of the summaries.
Skip long hours of after-call work time without compromising on quality.
How does Custom Summarization Reduce After-Call Work?
Custom summarization is a powerful tool that significantly reduces the burden of after-call work (ACW) for contact center agents.
By tailoring the summarization process to meet the specific needs of a business, it enhances efficiency, accuracy, and overall productivity.
To give a sense of how customer summarization reduces after-call work, we’ve laid down a timeline that will help you understand it better:
Before Implementation
- Manual Summarization: Agents spend significant time manually documenting call details, resulting in long after-call work (ACW) periods.
- Inconsistent Documentation: Variability in how agents summarize calls leads to inconsistent records and potential errors.
- High Administrative Burden: Agents are burdened with repetitive tasks, which reduces their capacity to handle more calls and affects job satisfaction.
Day 1: Implementing Custom Summarization
- Setup and Integration: Custom summarization tools are integrated with existing contact center systems, such as CRM and ticketing platforms.
- Template Creation: Business-specific templates ensure summaries capture all necessary information tailored to the organization’s needs.
Week 1: Initial Adjustments
- Training Sessions: Agents receive training on how to use the new custom summarization tool.
- Real-Time Summarization Begins: Automated, real-time summaries start to be generated during calls, allowing agents to see the benefits immediately.
Week 2: Increased Efficiency
- Time Savings Realized: Agents notice significantly reduced time spent on ACW as the automated summaries take over manual documentation tasks.
- Consistency in Summaries: Summaries become more consistent and accurate thanks to the AI-driven summarization process.
Month 1: Full Integration and Optimization
- Feedback Loop: Agents and managers provide feedback on the custom summarization templates, leading to further refinement and optimization.
- Enhanced CRM Integration: Summaries are seamlessly integrated into CRM systems, ensuring easy access and reducing duplicate data entry.
Month 3: Operational Benefits Evident
- Increased Call Handling Capacity: Agents can handle more daily calls due to reduced ACW time.
- Improved Customer Follow-Up: Accurate and timely summaries allow for better and quicker follow-ups, enhancing customer satisfaction.
- Reduced Errors: Automated summaries minimize the risk of human error in documentation.
Month 6: Strategic Advantages
- Data-Driven Insights: Summarization data is analyzed to uncover trends and insights, informing strategic decisions.
- Enhanced Training Programs: Consistent summaries improve training programs for new agents, reducing onboarding time and enhancing skill development.
- Resource Optimization: Better resource allocation as agents spend less time on administrative tasks and more on customer engagement and complex problem-solving.
Ongoing: Continuous Improvement
- Adaptive Learning: The AI models power custom summarization continuously to learn and improve, staying up-to-date with the latest language trends and customer interaction patterns.
- Scalability: The summarization tool scales effortlessly as call volumes increase, maintaining efficiency without additional resource strain.
- Employee Satisfaction: Reduced administrative burden leads to higher job satisfaction and lower agent turnover rates.
Convin’s Approach to Custom Summarization
- With Convin, call summarization is a step agents can skip altogether, as this call center software summarizes conversations for them.
- Convin passes the keywords from conversations through large language models (LLM), which generate the summaries in seconds.
- Once a call is over, the agents can click on the summary button to generate it.
- This quick and easy summary generation helps call centers skip hours of after-call work and focus on more important tasks.
Getting Started with Custom Summarization
Embracing custom summarization can revolutionize the efficiency and effectiveness of your contact center operations.
Custom summarization allows you to tailor the process to meet your business needs, enhancing agent productivity and enabling more personalized and effective customer interactions.
Still wondering how to get started? It’s simple. Consider integrating advanced AI-driven summarization tools into your existing systems, training your team on their use, and continuously refining the templates to capture the most relevant information.
Book a free demo with Convin to get started.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What is an example of after call work?
An example of after call work is updating customer records, summarizing the interaction, and scheduling any necessary follow-ups.
2. What is the after call work called?
The after-call work is called After Call Work (ACW).
3. How long should after call work take?
After call work, or call wrap up time, should ideally take a few minutes, typically between 2 to 5 minutes.
4. How to calculate after call work?
To calculate after call work, measure the time taken from the end of the call until the agent is ready to take the next call. This duration can be tracked using call center software systems.
