A great customer experience in the contact center starts with a great agent experience. The best agents want to remove friction and barriers so they can resolve the customer’s concern in a timely manner. Decades ago, that meant having the “knowledge binder” nearby. Today there are more effective tools than the binder, however the desire to help the customer remains.
Creating a culture of learning, improvement, and innovation is what best-in-class contact center leadership does. Here we go through some of the best practices for prioritizing agent experience we have gathered and why those can be effective within your company.
Knowledge Management Should Be Easy in Your Contact Center
The customer is calling or contacting your company for one reason: they need your help for something they can’t do or find the answer to on their own. If the customer feels that the agent doesn’t know the answer, or can’t resolve the issue in a timely manner, their trust in your company diminishes with every note of hold music they hear.
What does the process of finding answers to common issues look like for your agents? How about complex issues? If it is not self-guided, or at your agent’s fingertips then knowledge management can help solve that problem.
Unlocking the power of what knowledge management can do for your agents is powerful. Listening to the Inflow Experience podcast on knowledge management can help you understand the impact on your contact center, your customers, and ultimately how people perceive your company & brand overall.
Listen and Acknowledge Your Agent’s Ideas
The best-in-class contact centers have regular discussions with their agents off the floor. What is discussed in those meetings is not dissecting every call or interaction. Quality Assurance can be solved through AI & Automation. These discussions are about how to overcome challenges, best practices the agent implements & innovative ways to tackle common issues.
At Toyota, they have a culture of innovation, because the assembly line workers bring solutions that save time, and they implement those changes if the worker can showcase those time savings. Because time savings (other than safety) is top of mind.
When an agent has an idea that they share with leadership in these meetings the number one priority should be to fuel those innovative thoughts, not shut them down with “we have tried that” or “that costs money”. Really dive into it and ask probing questions to continue the discussion. If there is a tool or tech to help enable that innovation chances are over time, there will be cost savings. Agents get enough challenge and pushback from customers, these meetings, when done right should be a reprieve from that friction.
Right People in The Right Place at The Right Time
Agents like to be challenged and busy, however, no one likes to be overwhelmed or hear from every caller how they had to wait on hold for 20 minutes. On the other side of the coin, they don’t enjoy being idle for long periods of time.
Workforce Management or WFM helps ensure you have the right number of agents and the right agents in place at the right time. Anticipating peak call volumes, anticipating sales and upgrade possibilities based on prior interactions, and being able to take that data to formulate campaigns are all possible through WFM.
Not only can you have proper staffing in place, but you can also improve the customer experience and unlock your agent’s full potential. AI-powered solutions make forecasting, planning, and scheduling easier than ever before. What used to take hours or days of strategizing is now automated.
Partner With a Company That Knows Agent Experience In Your Contact Center
We know a lot about agent experience in the contact center because our team has been in the agent seat, lead agents & run call centers. So, if you are looking to elevate the agent experience in your contact center, make a call to InflowCX today!
