Empower Contact Center Agents

Customer experience is a high priority for any business. Improving and enhancing it is worth the investment, as it can result in loyalty, trust, and satisfaction. The frontlines of customer experience are your contact center agents.

They require training and guidance to handle customer complaints and challenges. While that’s a big part of how agents can deliver flawless customer experiences, it’s not the only tool they need. Equipping your agents with the right technology is essential as well.

In this post, we’ll explore tactical strategies to empower your workforce and what technology platforms they need to be successful.

Ensure Internal Communication Is Easy and Fluent

Agents, no matter their tenure or training, will get questions from customers that are new. In the moment, agents need a lifeline to provide the most accurate answer. That’s where a tool like team chat can help.

With team chat, your agents can use specific channels to discuss these new questions. Team chat also shows who is available, which can decrease the time to reply.

If there’s no consensus on the answer, agents can relay that they’re working on it. Additional conversation can continue in the team chat to refine the response. When another agent gets a similar question, they’ll be able to go back to the archive.

Train Often and Offer It On-Demand

Contact center training is ongoing. It doesn’t end after onboarding, as so many things can impact the types of customer calls received. 2020 ushered in significant disruption, as companies had to retrain agents on how to handle COVID-related questions.

Internal events can cause this, too, such as new product launches, product recalls, a cyberattack, or anything else that impacts customers.

Continue to train your staff in multiple ways to bolster engagement and information retention. Here are some must-haves for training:

Create a knowledge base that’s easily accessible and centralized.
Include interactive exercises in training for real-life practice.
Record calls with quality assurance and monitoring tools that you can then evaluate and weave into training.
Offer on-demand training modules that agents can tune into whenever their schedule allows.

Leverage Contact Center Analytics to Enhance Understanding

Data is the key to insights and improvement. With contact center software, you can track many metrics that can be critical for agent development.

You can measure:

Agent performance
Queue performance
First-call resolution
Talk time intervals
Daily transfers
And more

By sharing these analytics with agents, they can have a better picture of overall performance. By diving into specifics, agents gain clear takeaways on how certain responses resolve issues on the first call, reduce hold time, or anything else corresponding with improved customer experiences.

Make Customer Information Accessible Through Integrations

One of the best ways to delight customers is to know them and their history. When a customer contacts your business, and it’s not the first time, they can become easily frustrated if they have to recite their past issues and grievances.

Providing contact center agents access to this information helps them better prepare and saves customers from repeating themselves. You can do this more seamlessly by integrating your contact center software with your CRM. Customer details can quickly pop up on their screens so that they can respond appropriately.

Put Omni-Channel Routing in Place

Agents can easily be overwhelmed when routing and channel integration aren’t in place. It can undermine productivity and cause agents undue additional stress. Providing them with a central hub where all customer touchpoints are in one system alleviates this.

Ideally, you’ll want to capitalize on intelligent routing, where customers respond to questions via IVR (interactive voice response). Based on these, the system routes the call to the agent group designated for those call types. Customers talk to the applicable agent, and the agent isn’t bombarded with calls outside of their skillet.

The solution you use should integrate all channels, including phone, webchat, social media, and email. As a result, your agents work from a universal queue, streamlining the process and allowing for greater efficiency by agents and better customer interactions.

Allow Agents to Work Remotely

Contact centers adopted remote work models in 2020 out of necessity. Many found this to be a successful deployment. It benefits agents by letting them work in any environment and have more flexibility in scheduling. This autonomy is something that empowers them.

Companies benefit as well by being able to expand their talent pool outside of their physical location. It likely helped them retain agents as well.

With greater job satisfaction due to this move can easily equate to better service by agents. With analytics capabilities, you can track all this to see if it positively impacted customer experiences.

Be Consistent with Feedback

Agents want to hear feedback from their supervisors. Silence to them could indicate they are just status quo. Praising them when they achieve great results boosts their confidence.

When the opposite occurs, approach this by coaching people up and providing more training to grow and improve.

Empowering Contact Center Agents: Process, Technology, and Culture

Your contact center agents can improve performance and deliver consistent, quality customer experiences with these strategies and techniques. By defining processes, providing technology, and working on a positive culture, your team can realize goals and objectives.

Learn more about the connection between software and customer loyalty by reading our post on the topic.