ACW Meaning: How to Improve Your After Call Work and Boost Sales

According to Zippia's Call Center Statistics, problem resolution is the top priority for 90% of customers worldwide.

Sometimes, for you or your call agents to resolve customers' issues effectively in your contact center, you must carry out some follow-up tasks to ensure they don't call in again for the same problem.

After Call Work (ACW) is one helpful metric that lets you gauge the performance of your call representative and how well they satisfy your clients.

In this article, we will explain ACW meaning and tell you how to reduce your call center ACW time to boost sales.

What is After Call Work?

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After Call Work (ACW) refers to all the necessary tasks completed by a contact center's agent after a phone conversation with a customer. It is a significant component of the Average Handling Time (AHT) of a business so it plays a part in how well you serve your clients.

Being a customer service KPI, ACW can measure the efficiency and productivity of a call agent and contact center.

ACW time is the duration it takes to wrap up specific activities concerning a customer's problem after handling them. These activities can vary, depending on the issue to resolve.

Some examples include:

Logging and summarizing call notes

These are notes from a previous call detailing the conversation between the call agent and the customer. These call notes serve as guides for future conversations and the customers won't have to repeat themselves if/whenever they call back

Assigning an agent for a follow-up

If the issue is beyond your capacity or requires external help, you can assign another call agent to follow up with outbound calls or escalate the matter to the appropriate team to resolve.

Relying on call notes to update CRM

These days, companies have CRM systems that allow colleagues to communicate and collaborate. Call agents usually update their CRM tools with the call notes for record sake.

How to Improve After-Call Work

The steps below can help you optimize the ACW of your team members.

Practice detailed note-taking

Detailed note-taking is one trick that has proven to make ACW tasks easier and faster to achieve. It is vital to take note of key points of your conversation with your caller and jot down the steps you took to resolve their issue.

For better results, you can take notes while the conversation continues. This allows you to confirm or clarify specific details from the customer while they are still on the call.

Another benefit of detailed note-taking is that it gives anyone who stumbles on the case in the future detailed insight into the issue and the steps you took to resolve the problem.

Rely on abbreviation and shorthand to save time

One way to reduce ACW time is by writing common acronyms, abbreviations and shorthand words when taking notes. You do not need to ultimately spell out every word or acronym, as this might take a longer time.

If necessary, you can create a company guide for shorthand and abbreviations to achieve uniformity across all team members. It will make it easier for future users to understand the meanings of the abbreviated words.

Leverage automation solutions

Adoption of artificial Intelligence in customer experience has made working much better, helping us achieve more in less time.

AI solutions like Ender Turing can help you improve the quality of the service you render to your customers in your call center.

With Ender Turing, you can analyze calls 20x faster, review chats and also give immediate feedback to your colleagues in real-time to provide faster solutions to your clients.

Automating your processes saves you lots of time, boosts productivity, and gives your customers a seamless experience.

How to use your call center ACW to boost sales

Source: Pexels.

Having an optimal ACW can help you boost sales for your businesses. Here is how you can do that.

Prioritize Customer Satisfaction

Customers value their time, and they appreciate it when businesses quickly provide solutions to their problems, preferably on their first call or contact. Customer Service Statistics by Khoros reveal that about 83% of customers are loyal to brands that respond to and resolve their complaints and 65% will switch to a different brand because of a bad customer experience. This shows you the extent customers will go to achieve satisfaction. When you resolve customers' issues timely and accurately, they become return customers and refer your business to friends. This publicity will boost your brand's sales, resulting in higher business revenue.

Implement better follow-up systems

Having systems in place makes it easy for your call agents to complete their duties efficiently to satisfy your customers.

Your ACW system should help you write more details and get proper customer feedback. This allows you to understand their needs and interests better.

You will also know when and how to follow-up with customers to make sure their needs are met. As a result, you’ll have happy and satisfied customers who’ll keep coming back to you.

Tools that can help you automate processes

We have several helpful tools at our disposal today, but the following software can help you achieve the best for your call canter.

Interactive Voice Response (IVR) software

An IVR system is a software that plays recorded greetings and menu options to customers when they contact a call center before transferring them to a queue.

These systems' idea is to first interact with customers to find out what they need and encourage self-service before using intelligent routing to connect them with the most qualified call agent to solve their problem.

Chatbot software

Using conversational bots is another cost-effective way to automate certain processes for your call center to reduce ACW time. Chatbots use self-learning to interact with customers and anticipate their needs, making it easier to resolve their problems quickly.

They provide many benefits to call centers, such as

Helping improve the speed and efficiency of call centers
Allowing you to know your customers better
Giving your clients a personalized experience
Being very cost-effective
Boosting customer satisfaction

Performance management software

Performance management solutions are systems used to track and improve agent performance to ensure that they are achieving organizational goals.

You can get real-time feedback from your colleagues and customers which enables you to carry out personalized coaching of your call agents. Additionally, you can combine your calls with a modern sales deck creator and send your prospect a personalized sales pitch. This type of tool allows you to track how many times your prospect went through your deck, and gives you important information for ACW.

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Conclusion

James Cash Penney once said, "The well-satisfied customer will bring the repeat sale that counts," and we couldn't agree more. If you want to boost the sales for your business, you need to give your customers a memorable experience to convert them into loyal brand ambassadors.

With Ender Turing, you can reach your KPIs while enhancing agents' training and ensuring a better first call resolution.

FAQ

What is ACW call center meaning?

A call center's After Call Work refers to all the tasks completed by a contact center's agent after a phone conversation with a customer. These tasks could include:

Reviewing feedback
Updating a CRM system
Following up
Communicating with a colleague

How do you calculate ACW?

To calculate ACW as a percentage of Total Handling Time, you divide the time spent on ACW(in seconds) by the total amount of time spent handling customers and then multiplied by 100.

i.e. (Time spent on After-Call Work / Time Spent Handling Customer Calls) * 100

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