The digital world has transformed the arena of competition for businesses with customer experience taking the lead. It’s no surprise that if you aren’t giving customer experience the preference it requires, your competition is going to gain an edge. Customer experience is measured from the customer’s perspective and the link to serve this experience is your agent. Thus, if you ignore this crucial link between customers and your organization, chances are your business can suffer in more ways than one.
A CCW study showed that COVID induced pandemic has led to an increase in customers’ adoption of digital channels for resolving queries.
Now, it is the agents who stand at the end of these requests. The best way to deliver an uber customer experience is by giving each customer your undivided attention as if they were your one and only customer. But is that feasible?
The answer is YES, provided you have the tools to make it happen.
What is Agent experience? Why does it matter?
If you imagine your industry to be an automobile, then agents are the engines that drive it. And the one thing needed to maintain that machinery is to oil it regularly.
This oiling when applied to the agents in the scenario can be done by:
- Equipping them with the right tool to perform their task optimally
- Preventing agent burnout
- Keeping them motivated
- Working on feedbacks
Thus, agent experience is the holistic view of how empowered, efficient, and effective your agents are. They work directly with customers and become the representing face of your organization. If agents don’t perform well, it impacts customer perceptions and business growth. So modern-day contact centers need to become agent-centric first in order to deliver customer-centric services.
To win long-term, it is important to focus on both the ends and the means to get there. Always remember that a great customer experience is a result of an even great agent experience.
Ways to gauge bad agent experience
When you witness any drastic changes in your organization’s performance, revenue realization, or growth per se, the reason can be internal or external. But a majority of times, the internal inadequacies reflect in the outward performance.
Some symptoms of ailing agent experience in your organization can be:
Absenteeism:
Voluntary engagement is essential for a productive employee. If your agent has started showing absence, it might be driven by stressful work conditions and the undue burden of their shoulders in terms of manual work.
Inefficacy:
Happy agents are productive employees. A drop in their productivity can hint at some flaws in the organization’s management. These could be due to inadequate tools to leverage their productive spirit or non-recognition of their job.
Unengaged customer interactions:
Stress at the workplace can render agents ineffective in handling their customers well. They might not be able to give shape to personalized communications and just go about their business because it ought to be done.
Agent experience: How to improve?
Recent innovations in the customer service industry have focused on making agents happy. Gamification, contests, prizes are some tricks that can deliver results in the short term. To keep agents motivated, here are some solutions that hit at the root cause of persisting symptoms:
Equipping agents with the right tools:
If your agent is dedicating a majority of his time doing manual work, now is the time for some change. Dreary, repetitive, manual work can drain anybody. Moreover, this is not what agents should be doing. They should be spending a major chunk of their time in interaction with customers. Unified Agent Desktops can cut down this work by unifying information on a single screen. The all-in-one desktop offers a single interface to agents that can provide a seamless customer experience. Furthermore, solutions like Contact Center Wallboards, CTI Connector, AI-based customer engagement platforms empower agent with unified data, thus saving the time spent on verifying customer details.
Reworking the routing mechanism:
A majority of customer interactions suffer because they get routed to the wrong agent and they are left repeating their story to them. Automatic call distribution centers offer remedies in case of wrong routings. Not all agents are equipped to handle all customers. Cloud-based contact centers allow agents to be pulled from a qualified pool wherein the call gets routed to the right agent. This saves time and ensures meaningful interactions take place.
Access to real-time performance metrics:
NovelVox wallboards give you the power to make in-the-moment decisions allowing better responsiveness. The wallboard dashboard keeps agents informed about their KPIs in real-time and engages agents while also keeping them motivated. From audible alerts to specific mentions, wallboards are a great tool to enhance agent productivity. Supervisors can monitor agent performance easily, thus ensuring that agents are keeping up with business objectives.
A 2016 benchmarking report from Forrester shows that 85.7 percent of respondents foresaw the role of CX becoming increasingly important in their organizations.
Having happy and satisfied customers is fundamental to the growth of an organization. A happy and satisfied employee translates into improved business outcomes and a better customer experience. Simple strategies of empowerment, engagement, and motivation can go a long way. So, invest in agent experience to reap the benefits of satisfied customers.
“Revolutionize CX by transforming agent experience for the better”
