Creating a memorable customer experience is the end goal of every contact center. To achieve this, contact centers need a seamless amalgamation of technology and an agent’s efficiency. So, it is clear that your contact center business needs to maximize agents’ productivity to achieve the best results and probably deal with unhappy customers in a much better way. Let’s understand how to improve agents’ productivity in 15 simple ways.
- Real-time metrics
Agents need to be updated regularly on the number of calls in queue, average waiting time, agents’ real-time performance, and more. This improves the efficiency of agents and gives way to healthy office competition which is likely to better the performance of all agents on the floor and increase the contact center revenue. A display of stats on the wallboard helps in monitoring and motivating agents.
- Omnichannel presence
Multiple platforms for agents to connect with your customers is a great way to analyze their performance and increase productivity. An omnichannel approach allows them to handle a higher number of clients or customers with a single contact center software. It will get easier to identify the agents who are pro at resolving queries of multiple customers and the ones who are not. Even customers prefer a company with an omnichannel presence as a trust factor.
- Contact center software
To improve an agent’s productivity, you need to provide them with the best-in-class contact center software solution. For instance, Cisco unified agent desktop offers enhanced customer and agent experience. It can do wonders for agents and your business. Agents can have a 360-degree view of customer information on a single screen. Also, agent desktops with the features to optimize interface proves to offer higher productivity as agents can focus on the required fields only. Remember, no contact center software is useful enough without seamless integration. It empowers agents by fetching the correct customer information from relevant 3rd party applications.
- Multitasking
Of course, with an omnichannel presence, agents will be handling a larger call volume across channels, but with an integrated contact center solution, agents will be able to multitask. They can manage customers across channels within a single interface by swapping between channels. Also, an application like ticketing and billing can be taken care of with seamless integration in place.
- Mobile agent app
For higher agent productivity, the contact center needs to make them operate from anywhere with the help of a Mobile Agent app. The app offers on-floor contact center agent desktop features on mobile or tab that can be accessed from anywhere across the globe. So, you can hire skilled agents from anywhere in the world and integrate remote workers into geographically dispersed teams. Customers can have a consistent experience with much-empowered agents.
- Supervisor monitoring
Everyone needs monitoring and support for improvement. So, your contact center needs a supervisor desktop to monitor agent performance and guide them whenever required. A supervisor desktop allows you to live barge in, route calls, or perform re-skilling of agents.
- Know your agents better
Regular meetings and training can energize agents to do better. With the help of stats from the wallboard and supervisor monitoring, team leaders can identify agents who need training and relevant topics. Also, one-to-one sessions with managers, team leaders or HR can further help them understand the process or vent out their confusion or issues. Hearing out agents is necessary to relieve them from the everyday pressure and reduce churn out.
- AI for sentimental analysis
Talking more about technological support to enhance agents’ productivity, the contact center needs to have a powerful tool, Artificial Intelligence (AI) in place. The sentimental analysis performed with AI empowers agents to understand their customers’ behavior, satisfaction level for products/services, and more. Subsequently, they are capable of pitching the right solutions at the right time.
- Chatbots to rescue
Another amazing boon of AI is the chatbot. It acts as the extra hands of agents by sharing the workload. Chatbots free the agents from handling repetitive queries with a definite answer and provide them more time to focus on specific or complex issues and polish themselves as subject matter experts. With chatbots, agents can better manage their work shifts. Also, since chatbots remember customers’ preferences and pitch accordingly, it allows agents to get more prepared for complex queries.
- Mission and vision of the organization
A contact center must make clear to all its agents of the company’s mission and vision. This helps agents to stay aligned with the end goal and perform accordingly. Sudden expectation increases pressure on agents and deteriorates their performance. So, this will keep them prepared.
- Flawless scripts for consistent performance
Another amazing way to better the performance of your agents is to provide them with a nicely framed script created with the help of an agent scripting tool. It is a series of the dynamic guided script, giving you the option to optimize it with the change in process, product, and so on. For instance, the NovelVox agent script gadget is a pre-built tool that guides the agent throughout the call process and enables a newbie to handle calls like a pro.
- Incentive and rewards
Everyone loves appreciation for hard work, and so do the agents who are busy all-day handling customer queries. Some incentives or bonuses for exceptional work will motivate them to do better. Such an act of appreciation motivates other agents to perform better than what they have been doing.
- Automation
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) enables agents to get higher output with zero human error. RPA helps in automating repetitive tasks that kill agents’ valuable time that is required in handling other customer issues. So, with RPA in place, things like updating contact details, and pasting a definite reply can be sorted with bots.
- Consider the agent’s feedback
For contact centers, it is necessary to consider customers’ feedback. Similarly, it is essential to consider the agent’s feedback too. Since they are dealing with customers day-in-day-out, agents tend to have a different perspective on things. It is required to work on the agent’s feedback to make their life better and increase their productivity.
- Knowledge Base
A knowledge Base is a universe of information that empowers agents to handle every call more efficiently. Agents can instantly refer to required information while resolving customer queries and share related documents with the customer for better understanding. Similarly, there are gadgets like inter-team communication and agent phonebooks that help improve the agent’s performance.
To conclude, long working hours with no breaks is not the way out when it comes to agent efficiency. It is about making agents feel more valued, encouraged, and engaged in work to deal with stressful situations and perform their best all the time.
