Gone are the generations raised to believe the customer is always right. Employees today can have a tendency to take that frustration out on co-workers and even on customers — especially if they don’t feel appreciated, engaged, or otherwise happy in their roles. It can’t be said enough: the level of happiness your customers’ experience is directly linked to the experience and engagement of your call center agents.
Importance of Agents’ Experience
According to Gallup, 79% of employees aren’t engaged in the work they do, and this can then translate to unsatisfied customers. The best call centers know that improving call center agents’ experience results in better customer interaction and retention, and this could mean:
- Letting agents have more control over working arrangements
- Investing in improved workflows
- Empowering agents with tools that bolster self-esteem and pride
- Working on leadership
- Illustrating the call center’s value
Not paying attention to your contact center’s agents is a costly mistake. After all, happy agents make happy customers. But being able to implement the above strategies means first employing some lesser-known tips.
5 Tips to Enhance Agents’ Experience
Your contact center agents’ experience is just as important as your customers’ experience. Unsatisfied agents lead to unhappy customers. But improving agents’ experience improves your overall operations. These are five ways to help improve agent experience.
1. Utilize Text Analytics Tools
Are you analyzing agent performance with text analytic tools? These tools can help identify areas where agents are struggling or excelling. With text analytics, managers can assess the customer’s perception of their interaction with the contact center and identify sentiment trends for each agent and their workforce as a whole. From there, call center managers can identify overarching areas for improvement, agents who need training, agents who deserve rewards, and more.
To implement text analytics successfully:
- Analyze the most apparent issues first.
- Review the information and highlight any trends you notice.
- Seek feedback and encourage customers to provide it in their own words.
- With all the learned information, offer training on the most egregious issues first.
These steps can help boost your agents’ engagement and therefore improve your customer experience.
2. Employ Speech Analytics
Much like text analytics tools, speech analytics can help managers monitor an agent’s performance. Agents that perform better can be offered incentives while others that struggle can benefit from increased training.
Speech analysis tools gather feedback in much the same way as text but also offer contextual clues within conversations.
3. Analyze Agent Scorecards
An agent’s scorecard can monitor their overall performance in your contact center. This can also help identify areas of difficulty and bottlenecks in your workflow. This is another handy feature of speech analysis tools — they create scorecards that outline agents’ performance and measure it against KPIs you’ve set, such as First Call Resolution (FCR), Average Handling Time, and Customer Satisfaction Score, or Csats.
4. Invest In Call Coaching
Call coaching can be a great tool to build confidence in contact center agents. An experienced agent or manager coaching on a live call can help your agents build confidence in handling common issues and troubleshooting new ones.
Consistent call coaching helps your agents acclimate to receiving both good and bad feedback and continuously develop their skills. This process enables you to establish that no agent is better than any other and that even the best agents have bad days.
Setting up your contact center as an environment in which learning is allowed and encouraged sets the mood that questions are okay and that your agents can clarify anything they need to, knowing their feedback will be well-received.
5. Reduce Agent Turnover Rate
Turnover rates in a contact center can reflect poorly on management and your company. According to Gallup’s report, training new hires can cost as much as twice the salary of the departing employee. But higher turnover rates also mean more time is spent training new agents than caring for customers, which can contribute to a poor customer experience in the interim. It’s a vicious cycle that makes it harder for new agents to learn their role and get into a rhythm.
An Excellent Contact Center Begins With You
Tracking customer satisfaction is important — but remember agent engagement and experience is the other half of that equation. Excellent customer service happens with excellent contact center agents, and agents achieve excellence when you help them flip the switch on that vicious cycle. When you help your agents become motivated and engaged, improve their skills, and satisfy customers, the whole team’s morale and confidence are bolstered.
Call Tools is contact center software with everything you need to begin implementing KPI tracking, agent scorecards, and more to boost your agents’ experience, customer satisfaction, and take your contact center to new heights. Request a demo to see how Call Tools can work for your call center.
