Call outcomes, also known as disposition codes, are labels added at the end of a customer interaction that best describes the reason for the call. Here is a guide to recording call outcomes.

Modern contact centres, large organisations & ecommerce businesses deal with a lot of inbound queries on a daily basis, not just over the phone, but via live chat, email, WhatsApp & social media.  

Which is why it’s never been more important to monitor call outcomes to make sure you know exactly what’s driving enquiries into your business so you can stay one step ahead.  

Disposition codes give you a bird’s eye view of your business, so let’s take a look at how they work & what important information they can provide you with.  

Most contact centres have different disposition codes for each of their departments, specific to the types of queries those teams handle, however a few will be the same for each team.  

By separating them, you can run department specific disposition reports to see what queries are driving customer contacts within each team.  

See the below table for some of the popular disposition codes for different departments to give you an idea.  

Let’s take a look at some of the key benefits of using call outcomes/disposition codes: 

Track contact reasons 

Because each call is tagged, you can identify all the different reasons customers contact your business. By collating this information, you can proactively use it to try & reduce the number of contacts. For example, if you are getting a high number of calls regarding billing dates, it would suggest the information isn’t clear when a customer signs up. Once identified, you can then make sure this information is clear to all customers at the point of sales, regardless of whether the sale is done over the phone, in store, or via your website. This is one of the more common call recording outcomes explained in this guide.

Identify main contact reasons  

By understanding the main reasons your customer contacts you, you can work backwards & take a look at the customer journey, could this be made easier? Is there a better way for customers to find this information without having to speak to an agent? Can this process be speeded up for the customer? If for example, you were receiving a lot of queries regarding deliveries, you can look at how you keep customers up to date with delivery information. From there you can add in extra touch points to keep the customer informed by way of a text message. 

Identifying a breakdown in business processes  

If you notice unusual activity against certain disposition codes, it usually points towards something going wrong within the business. More silent calls then usual usually points to an issue with your phone lines.  

More specific billing queries such as not received my bill, will often point to an issue within the billing processes. Spotting these early reduces further complaints & negative customer experiences.  

Identify coaching needs 

Disposition codes are a great way of spotting patterns in agents calls, from shorter or longer than usual average call handling times, more escalated calls than other agents or even more call backs. These all point to extra training & coaching needs. For example, if you notice an agent on your team takes twice as long to deal with billing queries as the rest of the team, you know the likelihood is they are struggling to find the information or explain it simply to the customer.  

Compare & contrast  

The insights provided from disposition codes can go a step further to identifying which teams or individuals are doing a better job. By quickly spot patterns in teams you can train & coach underperforming agents or teams quicker.  

So how do these feed into reports?  

Disposition reports can be run at various levels as well as across different time periods.  

Full business  

This will show you the disposition of every customer interaction that be logged for the whole business in the specified time period.  

Department level 

This will show you the disposition of every customer interaction that be logged for the department you want to look at for the specified time period.  

Team level  

This will show you the disposition of every customer interaction that be logged for the specific team you want to look at for the specified time period.  

Individual level  

This will show you the disposition of every customer interaction that be logged for a specific agent you want to look at for the specified time period.  

It’s useful to run these reports daily, weekly, monthly. But they can also be run quarterly or annually to look up trends in contact reasons, which is particularly useful around holiday seasons. This is a focus key point explained in this guide about call recording outcomes. 

Within the reports, you will get to see the following formation:  

The reports will typically show you the total number of contacts for each disposition, the total handling time & the average handling time for each of those contacts as well as other important information.  

If you have an omnichannel platform that allows you to handle customers across all your different contact channels such as voice, email, live chat, WhatsApp & social media channels, you can even see a breakdown of the dispositions by channel.  

You may even find that customers use different channels to contact you for different reasons. For example, when a customer has a billing query, they will usually contact a business via the phone, due to the nature of the call. Whereas, if the customer has a general query, they might use live chat or even WhatsApp to reach out. You may even find that customers typically contact you after working hours for less urgent queries.  

By identifying this, it will allow you to plan & forecast agent availability for each channel better  

Summary: 

When it comes to disposition codes, try to keep it simple but relevant. Having 100’s of codes or similar codes will confuse agents & make them more likely to make mistakes.  

You can add in new disposition codes at any time so think of it as a work in progress, as your business changes & as customer trends change, your codes will change with it.  

As you can see, when used properly, disposition codes give great business insights, can reduce unnecessary contacts, help you plan your training & coaching, marketing & so much more.  

For more insights into this or to find out more about QContacts cloud based call centre platform, book in a demo to see how we can help your business.