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Customer experience is the top brand differentiator. But it is only half the story. If you are serious about customer experience (CX), start improving the call center agent experience. In an ‘experience economy’, CX pivots around the agent experience. The contact center agents are your brand ambassadors. Without the right support, coaching, and tools, your customer-facing agents are bound to fail. Now would the time to focus on agent experience and determine how it can impact the overall brand-customer experience.
Just like when improving CX, you would want to know customers’ unique needs, preferences, and expectations; you need the same thinking when improving agent experience. To prep your agents for better customer satisfaction, here are the top tips you can follow.
Average speed of answer in a call center
Speed is king, especially in customer service. But it is easier said than done. Your customers are constantly trying to reach out to you via multiple channels, sometimes with incomplete and incoherent messages. But with the right omnichannel experience, it is possible to build context and background history to your customer queries. Equipping your human agents with this kind of information is invaluable when resolving customer queries with a ticking clock in the background.
One of the biggest complaints of agents is the inability to access multiple knowledge banks while the customer is still on the call. Investing in a reliable AI-powered knowledge management system can reduce the workload on your agents and provide them the knowledge they need in real-time to help customers.
Real-Time Agent Coaching
With all the advances in AI and automation, customers still yearn for the human touch. Check our research findings here. So coaching agents with the right skill set is more important than ever. Stressing on soft skills like empathy, politeness, listening, and putting yourself in the customer’s shoes go a long way in building a robust customer-agent connection.
Traditional real-time agent coaching and onboarding modules focus excessively on teaching hard skills like learning new technologies. More interpersonal skills like problem-solving, root cause analysis need to be added to help agents do their jobs better.
Agent Empowerment in Call Center
Enterprises need to trust their call center agents to elevate the brand-customer experience. It might be necessary to empower agents to make on the fly decisions in the customer’s interest without always having to follow a formal chain of command.
Your call center agents, in most probability, are the only people that your customers might be ever talking to and discussing in detail their likes and dislikes about your brand. So, supporting agents with all they need to make customers feel at home is a top priority to build long-term customer relationships and brand loyalty.
The business leaders and decision-makers should also make it a point to take inputs from frontline agents to improve customer experience. The more you make the agents feel a vital part of the organization, the more value they will add to improving the customer experience.
Learn how Uniphore can help you improve the contact center agent experience to deliver a better customer experience.