So far we’ve looked at why Agent Experience (AX) is key to delivering impressive, connected customer experiences. We’ve also explored the challenges that create poor AX. But how do you go about enhancing Agent Experience in your own contact centre? Read on to find out…
No matter which way you look at it, better Agent Experience (AX) can change everything..
Research by McKinsey found that engaged and satisfied agents are 16x more likely to refer friends to their company. They’re also 8.5x more likely to stay than leave within a year, and over 3x more likely to feel extremely empowered to resolve customer issues.
If you’ve read the first blog in this series, it should be pretty clear why great AX is key to creating a stand-out, sustainable contact centre customer experience.
So now you’re probably wondering about the reality of doing this.
Three steps to creating five-star Agent Experience for your contact centre:
Creating an AX that boosts your CX comes down to empowering agents and giving them everything they need to deliver exceptional customer service.)
1. Automate where it makes sense - and let your agents shine where they're really needed
Offering customers the right blend of self-service and live, assisted service is crucial to delivering effective customer experiences. But it’s equally as important for ensuring your agents remain happy and productive.
By providing automated and self-service options (like a chatbot or online knowledge base) for simple and routine customer requests, you can save your agents’ time and reduce the number of mundane, repetitive tasks in their queues.
Likewise, smooth handoffs between chatbots and agents mean your people can step in at any time to resolve complex customer requests – requests that require specialist knowledge and experience. And that’s where real job satisfaction lies. (Who doesn’t love solving a tricky task and making a customer’s day?)
Achieving the right tech-to-human ratio can be more than a little challenging, but AI can help you out.
Specially designed algorithms can automatically categorise the types of requests coming in from customers. They can send simple tasks to self-service or automated channels and pass complex queries to agents.
2. Go beyond an omnichannel customer experience with orchestration
Customers now expect omnichannel customer service as a bare minimum. But there’s a big difference between providing channel options and delivering a great CX across them.
When you have multiple systems for managing multi-channel customer communications, you end up with siloed channels of communication. As a result, customer information can get stuck (and often lost) in these silos.
So, customers moving between different channels must repeat information they’ve already provided, sometimes over and over again.
When systems don’t talk to each other, your agents can’t draw on valuable cross-channel insights to enrich and elevate the customer service they’re providing.
So, you need to go beyond omnichannel.
When you orchestrate your channels, your customers and agents can move freely between them without leaving any important contextual information or insights behind.
To pull this off, you’ll need a platform that connects your channels and gives your agents access to every past and present customer interaction – regardless of which channel that interaction happened on.
Most importantly, you’ll need a platform that condenses all that valuable information into a unified, one-window interface. Which means your agents don’t have to toggle between screens and systems while your customer taps their toes.
Omnichannel-optimised platforms mean your customers will feel the benefit of faster issue resolution and less friction at all stages of their journey.
3. Activate a stress-free service for home-based and remote agents
The COVID-19 pandemic has increased the number of contact centre agents working remotely and at home. And as companies begin to see major cost savings, this way of working will inevitably become the new normal.
To give agents the flexibility they need to make this work, many contact centre operators are deploying cloud-based systems that support omnichannel service journeys from any location and any connected device.
Our cloud-based platform is designed to take the stress out of every aspect of contact centre work, wherever your agents are. It’s intuitive and easy to use, and agents can customise their interface to suit the way they work. (Everyone is different, so their technology should be too!)
It also integrates with collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams, ensuring help and advice from their colleagues is only ever a click away.
Puzzel’s platform also reduces anxiety for managers, providing them with a live and comprehensive overview of operations and performance. This enables them to monitor traffic and ensure their team is never under-staffed or overstretched.
It will also free agents up from the technical troubleshooting that accompanies less user-friendly cloud-based systems. This means your people can focus on their core customer-service tasks, and be their most engaged, empathetic, creative and human selves.
In the final part of the blog series, we’re looking at the exciting future and new business value that great AX creates.
Or, you can have a look at how our platform helps you build a better Agent Experience by booking a demo here.
