Customer Experience is the key factor that keeps customers engaged with your brand. Brands have embraced the power of customer satisfaction and are making purposeful efforts to ensure customers have a frictionless buying experience and effortless engagement. Agent and customer experience are strongly correlated, as agent distress directly impacts customers, resulting in poor active listening, high hold time/high AHT, or transactional discrepancies that lead to cancellations. When an organization focuses on improving agent experience, that company can expect to deliver an improved customer experience as well. Improving agent experience further helps organizations reduce burnout, increasing employee engagement and retention, by creating an empowered, confident work environment.
Here is how you can empower agents to improve customer experience.
Teach and Train
Agent training is one of the effective methods to enhance team members’ knowledge and performance. Training helps agents become skilled brand experts. With specific training and coaching, agents can understand practical applications for different customer objections and learn ways of executing effective rebuttals. Well-trained agents are efficient in handling customers’ requirements and providing them with solutions. Customers expect quick and seamless solutions, which makes highly competent agents key for achieving customer satisfaction.
To ensure agents are meeting business requirements, keep them updated with key trends that will influence customer experiences. Support expertise translated into effective coaching for agents’ critical behaviors, directly determines successful outcomes. By using large volumes of data to understand what training gaps your agent experience will help to apply precision analytics, such as Training Gap Assessment and Tenure Segmenting. These precise analytics make it possible to understand what topics/processes deserve more up-front training time while revealing when agents begin to deviate from best practices during their employee lifecycle.
Right Tools and Technologies
Isn’t it a little frustrating as a customer to hear the agent you’ve already been talking to for 10 minutes say, “Please hold, I’m waiting for my system to update”? This kind of interaction can lead to a poor agent and customer experience yet be totally outside of their control.
For agents to provide remarkable and satisfactory experiences to customers, they must have access to the necessary tools and technologies to provide positive interactions. Developing an integrated and continuously updated knowledge base can be effective for easily finding information about customer concerns. As technology advances, automating your knowledge base or LMS platform with a QM platform, such as Etech’s QEval, creates a full cycle of learning and knowledge/process management.
In addition, brands must also focus on building integrated technology infrastructures that unify customer interactions across the engagement platform, to deliver omnichannel customer experiences. Brands must also invest in learning management systems which will simplify agent training by making learning fun using gasification software to provide interactive modules to learn product information, processes, and techniques needed to create excellent customer experiences.
Equipping agents with the right tools and technologies not only make their work easier but also minimizes mistakes while empowering agents to provide quick resolutions to customers’ inquiries.
Prioritize Agent Engagement
Confident, competent, and satisfied agents are most effective when it comes to dealing with customers’ issues. They are more focused, engaged, and quick to identify and rectify customers’ concerns. The quality of an agent’s performance depends highly on how they feel about their role and organization. If agents are not happy with an organization’s approach to training and coaching, they will start reflecting on their performance. Frustration, burnout, and being overburdened with tasks can lead to poor performance of agents, further impacting the quality of their interactions with customers. A “human first” culture that embraces individuality while also emphasizing the importance of teamwork is a valuable component for agent success and employee retention in call centers.
Improving agent experience is a process that requires effort and planning. ’Focusing on proactive training, coaching tactics, and initiating feedback channels allows agents to express themselves, prioritize skilled leadership, understand and alleviate friction points, and invest in the latest technologies to help organizations build an empowered agent workforce. There is no magic wand when it comes to improving agent and customer interactions. It takes time and the right data to transform agent and customer experiences, but it is possible. Companies must start at the top and be agile in their approach. There is no “one size fits all” approach to building an AX program. When an organization starts engaging and empowering agents, it can easily create action plans to fine-tune operation processes, resulting in excellent customer experiences.
Do you know how Etech is achieving a high customer satisfaction rate and exceeding customer KPIs by empowering team members? Get in touch with us now to know!
