Table of Contents
Introduction to call pop
Call pop is a feature that displays important caller and account information about a customer on the call center agent’s screen. It is an important functionality for businesses that seek to improve the customer experience while ensuring control over key Customer support metrics like Average Handling Time and After call work.
FUN FACT: Businesses lose a whopping $75 billion on a yearly basis due to poor customer experience.
What customers want and what your company does best are the two elements that need to intersect to ensure a good customer experience. Their point of intersection is what defines your growth. Tools that help enhance customer service can help you big time. Call pop is one such useful tool.
What exactly is call pop and how can it help you enhance customer experience? What does it include? How can it improve other KPIs of your call center? This article will help you understand call pop in greater depth. Let’s dive in!
What is call pop?
Call pop is a capability used by call center agents or the front desk to access customer information for every incoming call through a pop-up agent that summarises important customer details. Here is an example of a call pop:
Call pop helps call center agents to get the most important information about the caller before they pick up the call which helps save them precious minutes looking up information in the CRM. In short, a call pop, also known as a screen pop is a tool that helps agents reduce average handle times for every incoming call and resolve customer queries efficiently.
What is the importance of call pop?
Customer support is something that matters more than the product or service you endorse. It is what builds lasting relationships, helps in customer acquisition, and causes a surge in your revenue. However, this is a tough nut to crack. To understand this, let’s put you in the customer’s shoes.
Imagine you have availed service from a company and have a query that needs to be resolved. Would you not have high expectations from the representatives? When you reach out to the company’s contact center, you will want to be greeted nicely, have your query resolved quickly, and hang up with a smile on your face.
Now let’s understand this from a call center agent’s point of view. The agent would also want to give a memorable, personalized experience to the caller, and ensure that the query is resolved as per the expectations of the customer, in the fastest way possible. But the catch here is that many times call center agents are swamped with calls, they don’t have enough time to check each caller’s case and even might end up missing calls here and there.
What stands out among these is the unavailability of basic information about the caller the moment the agent picks up the call. With no information at hand, the agent will end up asking everything again from the caller, which will only add to the average handle time and the caller’s frustration. This is when call pop saves the day. It provides the agent with all the necessary information about the customer, which helps the agent to converse accordingly and resolve queries quickly.
What are the benefits of call pop?
Call pop is a useful feature for call centers as it minimizes effort both on the part of the callers and the agent. Here are some key benefits that call pop brings along:
Call pop reduces the Average Handle Time (AHT)
Average Handle Time is the time taken by an agent to resolve a customer query.
Average Handle Time = (Total Talk Time +Total Hold Time + After Call Work Time) /Total No. of calls handled
With the use of the call pop, an agent would be able to reduce the average handle time (AHT).
How?
The agent will not have to spend time manually searching for the callers’ information. The moment a caller is directed to an agent, the former’s details will automatically pop up on the screen, providing the agent with all the basic information he needs. The lesser time spent searching for important information, the quicker the query will be resolved.
This would lead to a reduction in one of the most important call centre metrics: Average Handle Time or AHT.
Call pop offers personalized communication and better customer experience
Having the caller’s information available even before the agent/front desk answers the call will allow them to personalize their conversation with the caller. This would help create an opportunity to easily upsell another service to the caller or upsell a service to a family member.
In case an existing customer calls in from a new/different number than the one stored on the database, call pop allows adding new numbers to the customer’s account, thus making sure that customers are identified in the future irrespective of the number they call from.
Call pop results in better sales conversion
When the Average Handle Time is reduced, more and more queries will get resolved quickly. This will undoubtedly create a great customer experience which can be translated into better sales conversions.
Businesses that work towards enhancing customer experience witness a surge in their revenues as well, according to a Newswire report. If a customer has had a great service experience with your business, chances are that he will definitely recommend you to friends and family who might need your services. They might also write positive reviews on popular review sites explaining their experience. These word-of-mouth referrals and reviews will help you acquire more customers with time and create a strong brand image.
Call pop reduces the After Call Work
After Call Work is the set of actions that a call center agent needs to perform post his interaction with a customer. Also known as post-call processing, ACW is a part of customer interaction and is hence included in the AHT. It includes adding logging details such as the reason and outcome of contact, follow-up actions, etc. Call Pop allows the agent to know about the customer beforehand. Once the query is resolved, the agent will be able to wrap up the interaction in a lesser amount of time. Reduced time in wrap-up means reduced ACW and hence a lower AHT.
What data points should a call pop include?
Now that we’ve established the importance of the call pop, let’s dive into the details of what a call pop can or should show an agent on an incoming call.
To start with, a call pop should show the following basic details:
- The caller’s name
- Date of birth (if available)
- Last call received/Last Support Ticket/Last Appointment
- Their Status: Active Customer, Dormant Customer, etc
- Industry-specific call pops should include relevant customer details relevant to the industry.
- Account/payment details
Let’s take the example of a healthcare call pop. The call pop, in this case, should show details specific to the patient, including but not limited to:
- Patient Name
- Next Appointment
- Last Appointment
- Pending payments
- Insurance Details
- Details from patient intake forms (medical details etc)
This amount of information is enough for the agent to understand the customer that he’s about to interact with. Such background information will help him talk to the customer with ease, thereby enhancing customer experience.
How does call pop work?
When a contact center employee picks up a call, call pop will display a screen that contains all the information about the caller. This information is fetched from the CRM of your company.
Once the system recognizes any information entered by the caller, such as the phone number or the name into the IVR, call pop will match that information with the customer profile in the database and will display the same to the agent.
The best part is about the process is that it takes just a couple of seconds. The agent will have access to real-time data pertaining to the customer which will help them interact with the caller easily, without wasting time.
Let’s now dive deep into how call pop helps augment the KPIs in a contact center.
How can call pop improve KPIs in a call center?
The most important Key Performance Indicators for a call center are AHT, missed or abandoned calls, and customer satisfaction score. The presence of cap pop can significantly enhance these metrics. Let’s see how:
Average Handle Time
The average handle time is equal to the sum of talk time, hold time, and after-call work divided by the total number of calls.
With the information available to the agent with the call pop, there can be a significant decrease in the talk time and hold time as the agent would not have to reconfirm information from the caller or manually look for the caller’s information in the database.
The reduction in the metric average handle time is one of the most important advantages of the call pop/screen pop. As discussed above, with the caller’s information available to the agent automatically, the agent would not have to spend time asking for these details from the caller and looking them up manually in the CRM/system of record.
Since the basic information will already be available to the agent, the query will be resolved in a mindful way, thus leading to seamless interaction between the agent and the caller.
Missed and Abandoned Calls
One of the reasons leading to missed and abandoned calls is customer frustration. This frustration usually stems from either a long hold time or a lack of understanding of the caller’s problem by the agent. With the help of call pop, agents would be able to bridge this gap of misunderstanding and come to a resolution regarding the caller’s problems in an efficient way.
A reduction in the average handle time would also simultaneously lead to a reduction in other important metrics such as missed and abandoned call rates.
Customer Satisfaction Score
Another metric that would show a significant improvement is the CSAT. CSAT or customer satisfaction score is a measure of a caller’s satisfaction with the service provided. While customer satisfaction may be measured differently for different businesses, it is an organization’s responsibility to provide customers with good quality service. A couple of things that call center agents can do to ensure a smooth customer experience would be to not put the customers on hold for a long time and not take too much time to resolve a customer’s query.
Hence the use of the call pop can help improve important metrics such as abandoned or missed calls, AHT, and CSAT. Do you also run a call center? If yes, do you use call pop? If not, does your call center need one? Find out in the next section.
Signs that your contact center needs call pop
Does your contact center even have a requirement for call pop? And if so, how can you identify it?
As we discussed, certain important metrics can be improved through the help of call pop.
For identifying the requirement of a call pop for your contact center, you must analyze the following:
- What is the Average Handle Time at your call center?
You need to know what the AHT average is for your contact center. As you already know, AHT is the sum of the talk time, hold time, and ACW, divided by the total calls handled.
The current AHT industry standard is 6 minutes and 3 seconds. Measuring the AHT will help you assess employee performance, cut costs, and enhance revenue.
If you are experiencing a high AHT at your call center, the unavailability of the requisite information about the customer is one of the reasons. A high AHT means that you need a call pop.
- What is the call abandonment rate?
Call abandonment rate and the number of calls being missed in your call center is another important KPI. This is how call abandonment rate is calculated:
Call Abandon Rate (%) = No. of calls offered – No.of calls handled /No. of calls offered X 100
The current industry standard for call abandonment rate is between 5% – 8%. A call abandonment rate of 10% is considered ‘high’ according to industry standards.
If your contact center is experiencing a call abandonment rate of 10 percent or higher, then you need to implement call pop.
- What is your First Call Resolution rate?
The FCR rate is an indicator of how many customer queries were resolved on the first call with the call center agent.
FCR = Number of cases resolved first time / Number of cases handled in total
The industry standard for FCR is 74%. 90% is considered high and anything below 40% is low.
If there is a low rate of conversion on calls it could be due to a low CSAT score or a low FCR.
If your FCR rate is below 40 percent, then it is a strong indicator that you need a call pop.
If improving these numbers is something that is required for your call centre, you can explore using call pop.
FAQs related to call pop
What is call pop?
Call pop is a feature of VOIP that offers the call center agent all the necessary information about the customer whose call he is about to attend. Equipped with a background of the customer, the agent will be able to understand and resolve queries in a better manner.
What is the accuracy of the information provided by call pop?
The accuracy of the information in the call pop purely depends on the customer’s information stored in the database. Whatever information the agent sees has been pulled out from the database.
I have already installed a phone system. How will an additional call pop benefit me?
A phone system has its limitations as it won’t show a pop-up screen that has the customer’s information. A call pop on the other hand will give a basic knowledge of elements like previous interaction, survey response, etc. With such insights, the agent will be able to deal efficiently with the customer, thereby reducing the AHT.
What if customers have multiple phone numbers?
Customers can have multiple phone numbers, but all of those need to be tied to their accounts. Even if a customer calls from a different phone number that is included in his account, it won’t create any confusion.
Reduce AHT and enhance productivity with Emitrr’s call pop feature
Are your agents having a hard time dealing with customer queries without any background knowledge about the customers?
Well, call pop is a great tool to pull your agents out of their miseries. The call pop feature at Emitrr allows your agents to quickly pull out information about the customer they’re dealing with before they attend their call. This will save time on their end and significantly cut down the average handling time. The capability integrates with more than 1000 business software, allowing you to achieve operational efficiency and track conversions along the way.
Some of the capabilities of our call center call pop includes –
- Showing caller information such as appointments, recall, family members appointments., insurance, etc.
- Being able to fetch, schedule and book appointment from the call pop software itself
- Creating appointments directly from the popup agent
So, if you want to acquire more customers, retain your existing customers, garner positive reviews, and build a sound brand image; then investing in a tool like call pop is a great idea.
Conclusion
Call Pop can be a very useful capability to have in a call center. Being equipped with basic caller knowledge before even picking up the call can enable the call center agent to be well prepared and deliver a seamless customer experience. It not only saves the time that the agent would have spent gathering basic information about the caller but also helps decrease the Average Handle Time (AHT).
Some of the basic information that the call pop should include are Name, Date of Birth, Last Interaction, Upcoming interaction, Payment, and Insurance details (if any).
With a reduction in AHT, other call center KPIs such as, Hold Time, After call work, Abandoned call rates, and Customer Satisfaction Rate (CSAT) will also see a significant improvement.
Therefore, investing in a call pop software for your call center is the right decision. Sign up for a demo and explore what call pop can do for your business!
Leave a Reply