Ten Reasons Not to Abandon Call Scripting

Ten Reasons Not to Abandon Call Scripting

“We’ve thrown away the script!” says one contact center. “Only local agents!” says another. “Real conversations. Real people.” says a third. Companies advertise the quality of their contact centers in plenty of different ways. And promising to do away with call scripting is one of them. After all, call scripting is usually associated with artificial, disingenuous interactions and a lack of caring. But before you jump on the bandwagon, let’s not throw the script out with the bathwater.

Scripting does not preclude the possibility of a genuine spontaneous exchange. It doesn’t prevent agents from showing empathy or humanity. And it doesn’t turn agents into human automatons. With that in mind, here are ten things you might want to consider before you ditch the script.

1. Since agents don’t have to worry about what to do next, they’re free to act more naturally and listen to customers more closely.
2. Using call scripts can turn phone calls into data records. Having some standardization in how agents communicate with callers (or chatters, or tweeters, etc.) can make it easier to encode interactions and understand the content and meaning of calls—and subsequently turn that data into useful reports.
3. Call scripting guarantees consistency across your contact center. Your agents will all respond to similar issues in a similar fashion.
4. Using scripts forces your business to think about best practices, which can then be deployed through call scripting.
5. Want to give your agents more useful information about customers before a call even begins so they can tailor their interactions to the individual? That’s exactly what you get when you integrate call scripting with telephony and IVR systems.
6. A call script is simply a manifestation of a business process. It’s there to remind call center agents what the process is—avoiding human error or lapses of memory.
7. Using call scripts can dramatically reduce your contact center’s training requirements, which can contribute major cost savings if your agent attrition rate is high. In some cases, it can even reduce agent attrition rates as agents feel they have a better grasp on their jobs and their performance.
8. A script can be used as the skeleton for a unified agent desktop by combining a variety of enterprise, legacy and back office systems within a coherent process.
9. You can boost the performance of your entire contact center by taking new best practices from your best agents and incorporating them into call scripts across all agents.
10. Some contact centers may need agents to read out legally required text in certain cases in order to comply with laws and regulations—ones that often come with heavy penalties for non-compliance. You do not want your agents trying to recite these notices from memory or forgetting to say them at all. The stakes are simply too high.