Imagine a fully motivated contact centre agent who always works at 110%, who your customers love and who helps your business run smoothly at every chance. Now imagine a whole team of them and what it could do for your business in brand reputation, customer satisfaction and colleague retention.
While ‘designer agents to order’ is not a service we can provide, we’d love to share five things you can do to help breed super agents of your own.
1. Give them the information they need
When facing a customer query, agents need to be informed with 49% of agents wished they had more information about their customers. They’re looking for customer account information, a history on the customer’s account and all possible notes on previous interactions with other people across your business. With this information to hand they can provide your customer with a personalised experience and help them resolve their query quickly and easily.
With most customer information stored in CRM systems, a way to fast-track this information availability is by integrating your contact centre with your CRM to give a single view of the customer. Agents will spend less time toggling between systems and looking up customer information and more time listening to and helping the customer.
2. Training and improved knowledgebase
In a recent 2021 survey of UK contact centres across all industries, it was found that a mega one third of customers hang up on contact centre agents every day. Time is increasingly precious and consumer expectations are at an all-time high, so it’s not unusual for customers to expect an instant answer or solution – no matter how complex the query is.
However, agents are often thrown in and left to get on with it, without the right level of training to be able to support customers. And it only takes one poorly managed call to completely undermine the customer experience and company sentiment that your brand is working hard to portray.
In so many ways our contact centre staff are our brand ambassadors and should be trained with such in mind. They should receive continual improvement training so they feel confident in your systems, products and customer conversations. Although a lot of this relies on human interaction and experience, an in-depth, easy to understand knowledgebase built into your CRM or call centre environment provides one easy place to go to help manage the conversation well.
3. Collaborate and support them
Sometimes, however, it’s not a system that has the answer, it’s another person. Agents need to be able to reach out to other colleagues quickly and easily to seek advice, escalate a query or ask for a specialist’s expertise. And when they need to reach out, they need to know who’s there available to answer them. Super-agents know that they don’t know everything themselves, and love knowing that a team leader or manager is available to jump on a call with them and help them in real-time?
If your business already uses Microsoft Teams, then it’s worth exploring how it can integrate with your contact centre to get real-time availability and collaboration across the whole business. Agents can type an instant message to a Team or direct contact to ask for support and get an immediate response to pass to the customer.
For businesses are looking at different ways to alleviate the pressure on their contact channels, they’ve introduced a new feature to their websites called conversational AI or intelligent chatbots. These chatbots can help answer simple questions that customers are looking for the answer to, which helps free up agents’ time to deal with more complex queries and gives them more time to deal with them.
4. Allow for flexibility
Historically, the contact centre industry has lacked popularity amongst candidates as it has a reputation for an inflexible, clock watching culture. That’s not what today’s superstars are looking for. They want flexible working with adaptable shifts and schedules, so if you’re not considering adding this flex into your contact centre you could be missing out on recruiting the best people for the job.
Cloud contact centres have revolutionised the traditional contact centres by giving agents the freedom to work from any location on any advice. Management teams still have full real-time visibility of agent activity through intuitive portals and reporting, enabling them to manage shifts and adjust queues as needed, only difference is that they’ll be doing so remotely.
5. Give them time
When agents’ performance is measured by call time or time to ticket resolution, it can directly affect your customer experience, leaving them with unanswered or poorly resolved queries.
By changing the way you track performance and giving them more time to resolve queries, they will feel confident to give your customers a better service and the time they deserve. There are a few ways to free up their time:
Manage queues in real-time, making live adjustments to free agents as needed.
Assign queries to agents with specific skills to help with more technical queries.
Implement an omni-channel contact centre solution where agents can manage queries across all channels from one place including social media, text, web, email and calls. Text-based queries from social media, webchat and email are often quicker to respond to than calls so a great way of resolving more queries, quicker.
Creating a successful contact centre
Building a super-agent requires a change in focus. You need to give them the tools, support, flexibility and time to become super productive and support their growth. In turn they will be more confident in their role and your customers will be happier with your service.
Windsor Telecom offers an award-winning cloud contact centre solution, which allows organisations to confidently handle customer conversations through one single view and intelligently handles queries across agents and channels. And, as it’s fully cloud-based, agents can work from any location, supporting today’s hybrid workforce and improving shift management.
If you are interested in finding out more about what we do and the value this delivers to our clients, please get in touch.
5 ways to up your customer experience game 28th January 2023The experience we deliver our customers is really important. We share five ways that your communications technology can help your people deliver outstanding service every time.Read More
