Customer Experience is Directly Proportional to Employee/Agent Experience

You might/might not be a believer in the age-old aphorism, “ What goes around, comes around” but when it comes to contact centers it’s an established fact. Your employees/agents have a direct influence on your customer’s experience. This goes on to emphasize the general fact, “ Happy agents means happy customers”

CX has indeed become the next “it” thing in the business world and conceding the amount of investments done into improving CX, it’s undeniably the driving force or ought to become one in the industry. But the question is, “ Are we doing it right?” Does a bunch of satisfied customers just stem out of investments into the latest technology? Or by simply leveraging the window of digital transformation? Not entirely true.

As Kobe Bryant famously said, “99 percent of the people do not focus on basics” and this is true even in the case of contact centers. How? Your customers are going to interact with your agents and the sort of relationship they form goes on to define if the customer would ever come back. But how many industries actually focus on this relationship? You guessed it, not many!

“A research conducted in 2015 highlights that a mere 32% of the workforce felt engaged in their work. This is undoubtedly going to reflect when they interact with the customers.”

How can you revolutionize CX by focusing on agent experience?

CX without a doubt is the king-maker of the next decade, racing ahead of prices and products. Just like you wouldn’t get a flower without first thinking of the soil and the manure, you simply wouldn’t get happier customers without first thinking of your agents.

“Forbes research shows, companies with excellent CX are the ones that are 1.5 times more engaged than other businesses with less satisfactory CX.”

An agent who knows better, performs better:

What does a happy customer want? To not be repeating their story again and again, to get proactive services, to be listened to…

Now all this is a result of an integrated, seamless flow of information across the organization. You cannot reach for the stars by constantly borrowing fuel! Siloed systems would hurt your organization’s efficiency by making your agent sit out as a lame duck who has no clue about the customer or the information he needs.

The solution lies in breaking down these blocks and equipping your agent with all sorts of data that he needs to do a better job. Get him access to customer journeys with a Unified agent desktop, enable free flow of information to the conversations pivoted around context.

“According to the Trends Report, 76% of customers expect personalization from their brands.”

So, if you want your agents to greet customers on a first name basis, they ought to understand the customer interaction journey.

Why go to extremes, strike a balance?

Buddha asked people to walk the middle path, who knew it’s be a strategy to sell better!

We live in a digital world, tech savvy is the new definition of smart, but there’s something about a humanized touch that sets brands apart. A hybrid model is the best here. A culture of celebrating your employees can come from using technology sensibly to redeem them off repetitive, mundane tasks that kill competency.

AI, NLP, ML are all revolutionary technologies but don’t use them as a noose to kill genuineness and creativity.
One prime solution for this jeopardy is Conversational AI. Apart from streamlining customer engagement across channels, it can pave the way ahead for meaningful customer interactions.
Chatbots can easily answer Level -1 customer queries but the live agent should be roped in whenever a complex question pops up. This hybrid model keeps the human-touch alive and allows conversations to flourish into brand loyalties.

Nobody wants to feel frustrated getting scripted replies, no matter the question. And this makes it pertinent to keep the “human heartbeat” of your organization alive

Are you listening to your agents(and customers)?

Businesses are walking a tightrope between listening to customers and delivering what they expect. Omnichannel customer engagement renders you this edge by interacting with customers on the channel of their choice and making overall interaction a delight through behaviour analysis. But how important is an agent feedback?

Vital and transformative changes often come from within. An employee having worked in an organization can be aware of the bottlenecks and may even have a solution to ride over them. Depends how keenly you are listening.

Laying down a strong foundation for growth stems from being abreast with latest developments and heeding to the suggestions your employees offer. Because ultimately it’s the agents that interact with customers. They have a fair idea of what the customer wants. And it’s not a trade off between agents and customers feedback rather the former reinforces the latter.

Improved employee experience = improved customer experiences:

A narrow vision of CX would typically focus on customer touchpoints. It’s important too but covers only one aspect of the picture. It’s equally important to gain experience within your organization. An improvement in back-end processes for employees would translate into reward of improved CX with lesser friction and ease of use. This would also equip agents with better tools to upgrade their efficiency while feeling better about the job they do.

Need of the hour is to celebrate your employees by revamping traditional disconnected systems to a more integrated and connected experience through digital processes, creating collaboration channels and establishing business intelligence for unique customer experiences.