4 Smart Strategies to Improve Agent Productivity

Customer service is no more the way it was decades ago. From answering calls and issue redressal it has come off a long way. Today, it’s more about delivering customer delight in every possible manner. And it is how your customers perceive your service. According to a study by Bain and Company, there’s a 10X disparity between how brands perceive their customer service and their customers’ perception of their service. This huge gap pretty much determines how customer service has evolved over the years and where the majority is lagging.

But, with all these facts and figures at hand, are we creating any delightful experience for the customers? The prime question lies here. How do you achieve the results you desire when you know it impacts business?

Well, experts believe that the art of delivering experience starts inside (as the saying goes, “Charity begins at home”). Many organizations have lately shifted their focus on empowering support agents with cognitive capabilities to scale up their productivity, alongside stirring customer delight.

Here’s a couple of smart strategies to go for.

Super Agents Powered by Unique Agent Desktops

Research by Global Data reveals how some contact centers deploy AI technology to augment their customer service support. It certainly makes a wise investment at this phase than investing in human capital, which cumulates around $10,000 and $20,000 per agent on an average. Considering it as the need of the hour, many organizations are technically empowering their existing resources, improving their productivity, and improving customer experience.

One of the most acceptable ways to create productive agents is infusing feature-rich Agent Desktops into their everyday experiences. Leveraging best-of-breed technology like Cisco Call Center Software, you can effortlessly combine in-house capabilities along with new features. The result? Top-notch omnichannel customer experience with decreased AHT.

Having an agent desktop in your contact centers provides a call transcript and summary to automate the agent’s call wrap-up, saving a lot of time. With automatic sync with CRM applications, it brings a 360-degree customer information view so that agents can better handle things and serve customers without switching screens. What’s more! With top-notch agent desktops, you can well optimize your business using industry-specific desktop templates. Secondly, most high-end providers now offer a unified agent desktop as per the respective department’s needs. Such a feature not only accentuates agents’ performance but also adds to customers’ delight.

Analyzing Customer Feedback

Are you allowing your agents to perform meaningful analysis of your customers’ feedback and journey experiences? If not, you are thwarting the productivity of your agents. The job of a contact center agent lately ends with making or receiving calls or addressing issues. Instead, customers need a real-time answer. To start with, companies can go for unified contact center solutions that blend functionality and convenience for a better customer experience. With technical empowerment, contact center agents can now have real-time customer sentiment data at their fingertips. It gives them quite an opportunity to get familiar with the needs and preferences of the customers, thus enabling them to create a personalized experience with improved business outcomes.

Just imagine how your customers would feel knowing that the person they are talking with already knows about their past experiences, their purchase history, and their overall impression. And, who wouldn’t love a personalized follow-up? Moreover, doing this on a regular basis will turn contact center agents into perfect customer journey guides as and when required.

Empowering them with the Agent scripting tool

Top-notch contact center solutions come with guided Agent Scripting software, which offers a two-way benefit. First, it simplifies the business complexity through a well-defined business workflow logic. Secondly, it enables agents to deliver the highest level of customer experience while maintaining regulatory compliance.

For the managers, it’s easy to design the complete business workflow logic visually. Featured with simple drag & drop designer software, it allows enough convenience and flexibility to the managers to have a logical business workflow designed without much manual interference.

The tool offers continuously updated agent scripts as per the evolving business needs. With guided scripts at the easiest access, even a newbie can work like a pro. This means, your agents can engage in meaningful conversation with the customers, thus reducing about 50% of level 1 call escalations and improve First Call Resolution (FCR) by 45%. Moreover, with the guided script in place agents no longer require comprehensive training to learn business flows.

Intuitive Wallboards to Monitor & Motivate Agents’ Performance

Amazing contact center wallboard designs provide real-time data for individual and team performances. With better UX, responsive designs, and gamification, wallboards are everything to motivate agents to perform better. While managers can set KPI thresholds to control performance, it’s kind of a push for the agents to perform better. For the managers, such wallboards offer an easy glance to multi-site seats, quick identification of errors, and making informed decisions.

So, What’s Next

With customer service becoming the backbone of business these days, organizations are increasing their focus on rebuilding their contact centers with unified contact center solutions. Technology has undoubtedly the prime role to play here. Because it helps in the evolution of the modern-day contact centers. Now that the question is whether it positively impacts the agents’ productivity, we need to admit that integrating technology adds new capabilities to every portfolio. But, to what extent will it impact the productivity level depends totally on the individual. Adding capabilities means empowering agents to deliver memorable experiences to their customers, but its usage depends on the contact center supervisors. After all, the team’s performance, to a large extent, is determined by the team leaders.