Recipe for Smart Call Center Agent (Skills + Technology)

However exciting a contact center agent job is, it tends to get a bit monotonous as lots of things are repeated in constant flux. If, as an agent, you do not have the required interpersonal and technical skills, it is going to be a tough ride for you responding to your customers. Indeed, it takes a lot of things to keep yourself inspired to have engaging sessions with your customers.

For a contact center agent, keeping the enthusiasm level high all the time, even when things look a bit more challenging, is a skill that an agent should have. This job is more than just informing clients or answering their queries, rather it is how you answer and make it a highly satisfying time for your customers that is significant.

A contact center agent who has the right skills and knowledge of technologies used in a contact center is the most suited for the job. He/she is confident and able to carry out their job with the highest degree of satisfaction for their customers.

Among some of the necessary skills that contact center agents should have to make the most of their job are as below:

Learner:

Contact center agents are expected to provide highly satisfying support to their customers. And something like that is only possible when they have the required knowledge to perform their job well. Therefore, their knowledge and ability to learn quickly are among the most important assets for any agent to have. Memorizing details about the products and services come to be very handy when responding to the customers as they feel cared for. But it is not always like that they should be able to respond to every query from the customer, it is more important that they also know when to transfer a call that they are unable to respond to and provide satisfactory answers to the same.

Focused:

To break the usual monotony, which may also let complacency sneak in, contact center agents should live in the present and be more focused on resolving customers’ issues by overcoming their comfort zone. An attentive agent is the most suitable candidate for the job, one who is ready to go beyond the canned responses and offer extended support to the customers.

Efficient:

Efficiency is one of the most important aspects of a contact center Agent’s job profile. But efficiency requires organization, and with it comes the former. Keeping about your work in a neat and organized manner is the recipe for an efficient and successful contact center agent. Having the required knowledge, attention to detail and the ability to juggle multiple responsibilities simultaneously such as updating CRM entries, checking up the knowledge base, taking notes, etc. are some of the things that exude efficiency.

Versatile:

At times, there are too many tasks that are to be completed by a contact center agent, which can prove to be a little too overwhelming or asking for too much from an agent. A versatile agent can handle any such situation efficiently and be able to handle and manage various tasks assigned. He/she should be able to manage customers of varying temperatures and requirements efficiently without losing focus.

Jovial:

Your customers know you through your agents. Agents are the flag bearer of your company. A happy agent reflects a happy company. A friendly and warm approach of your agents helps make highly satisfying customer interactions. A happy and engaging customer interaction goes a long way in establishing the trust factor and building strong customer relationships. The jovial/friendly nature of a contact center agent is a big asset for a contact center to achieve its objectives.

But apart from these individual skills, a contact center agent needs to have a good working knowledge of various software/technologies that are an intrinsic part of a contact center industry that help them perform their job efficiently. Some of the most important technologies a contact center agent should have a good idea about include-

Agent Desktop:

When it comes to one of the most important technical skills that an agent should know, it is very much related to the sound understanding of how an agent desktop functions. A contact center agent desktop is a tool through which agents communicate with customers. With the help of an agent desktop, agents can call a customer, hold or transfer a call from the customer. Not just all of that, a unified desktop agent generally comes with an array of features such as updating customer details, recent interactions, contact directory, personal stats, work bins, email/chat, etc., to help agents perform efficiently.

Agent Scripting Tool:

With the help of an agent scripting tool, administrators can easily define a set of questions or tasks based on the responses as entered by the agents against each to define a predictable course of action that meets services and sales goals defined for the team or an individual agent. This is an important tool in the contact center industry as it provides a sort of road map for the agent to work towards achieving the stipulated goals.

Agent Dashboard:

In a contact center, real-time stats are very important through which you come to know how happy and satisfied your customers are. All this information is provided to agents through tools like contact center agent dashboards (CCAD). It is an application that helps an agent to track service requests and their status. This dashboard tool displays customer service requests through various metrics such as average time waiting, calls in the queue, and other stats that measure performance vis a vis agent’s response time.

Interactive Voice Response (IVR):

It is the technology that helps agents to interact with callers. Through this technology, the calls can be routed to the most suitable agent for further assistance. This technology not only helps to streamline calls but also lets you know the first interaction point of a call to understand the purpose of the call. Good working knowledge of this system is something that a contact center agent is pretty much expected to have.

Automatic Call Distribution (ACD):

It is one of the most important tools that save a lot of time for contact center agents. It automatically routes a caller to the most suitable agent once the caller chooses a particular option. It provides the right response without wasting any time on the part of a caller and helps to improve the customer service experience. Furthermore, it is one of the major tools that help to improve AHT for a contact center, which is one of the major goals of contact center operations.

Tool integration:

By integrating various tools and technologies, such as the integration of a phone system with an agent desktop application or its integration with a CRM application, etc., can help agents to perform much better as then they will not have to use two different systems to gather the required information. Through seamless integration of various technologies, a contact center provides its agents with a smart platform to have highly effective customer interactions that are customer-focused and provide the highest level of satisfaction to the customers. Having some knowledge of these tool integration technologies will help an agent to be more efficient when handling calls.

An efficient contact center agent is expected to have the above-mentioned skills and technologies to make conversations engaging and offer a highly satisfying time for the customers and establish long-term relationships with them.