There is one thing that often imprints customer’s memory over everything else: service experience. It goes without saying that the success of mega contact centers largely relies on customer support agents’ ability to deliver quality experience with every interaction.
Agents who are proactive, knowledgeable, and professional in their conduct help your organization earn the reputation it so rightfully deserves. Their contribution is also reflected in the improving customer satisfaction metrics.
Without a strong frontline (service staff), you risk losing goodwill, customers, and revenue. Some contact centers only focus on quantity and gauge success by the number of cases dealt with in a given timeframe. For prolonged success of the firm, it is paramount to shift the priorities from quantity to quality of interactions by consistently improving agent performance.
This blogpost summarizes some nutty hacks to take your service mavens to a higher echelon and help your organization set new performance and revenue standards.
1. Define and Measure Agent KPIs
There is an old management adage that says you can’t manage what you don’t measure. Unless you quantify your agents’ productivity, you don’t know for sure if it is improving or not.
That makes capturing data a prerequisite to better agent performance. With analytics and reporting, managers can see which areas to focus on and leverage data to help agents evolve and achieve their goals. Some metrics that you should be looking at include:
- First call resolution (FCR)
- Turnaround time (TAT)
- Customer satisfaction rating (CSR)
- Hold time
- Average handle time
2. Streamline Information Access
If you want your agents to perform better, you need to provide them with seamless access to all the knowledge they’ll ever need. In case it is spread across disparate sources, which it usually is, then the agents will be wasting a lot of time on searching.
By providing your agents with an integrated arsenal of knowledge, you can clear their path and empower them to play their A-game. If an agent can access all the information they need to solve a case without having to leave the support platform they work in, they are bound to resolve more cases/tickets, even if they possess minimal training and knowledge.
3. Use Intelligent Routing
Though it sounds like a basic rule for support centers to follow, its importance cannot be emphasized enough. While most support tools offer inbuilt capability to use custom rules based on the criteria you define, the efficiency of the process depends on how smartly you define the criteria. For the process to work as planned, you need to strategize and define your routing rules and while doing so, you need to consider all these factors – source channel, topic, product/service, language, conversation history, agent or team skillset, workload, and availability. Smartly planned routing ensures that when a new case or ticket comes in, it is automatically sent to the most appropriate team or agent, increasing efficiency and decreasing workload.
4. Equip Agents with AI-powered Tools
While technologies like AI are revamping the core business functions, agents continue to remain a centerpiece in the support industry. While it cannot replace agents as of now, but there are ways it can help them communicate better and get the job done efficiently.
For instance, there are AI-powered apps that analyze data – about the case, customer profile (their behavior, search history, purchase history, etc.) and suggest relevant responses based on that data to quickly answer and keep turnaround time on the lower side.
5. Give Your Agents Insights into the Customer Journey
If your customers face any kind of problems, the odds are they will try and look for a solution before creating a case. They will browse and try searching for a quick fix. And if they fail to find something of value, they will create a case.
Now, it is important to track their every movement and provide the same to the agent. This ensures the service reps don’t suggest what the customers may have already tried. It improves agents’ TAT, FCR, and prevents further distress to your customers.
6. Drive Knowledge-Centered Support
Knowledge Centered Support (KCS) is about capitalizing on the collective knowledge of your organization and making it an integral part of solving problems and preventing future ones. By adopting KCS, you build a culture of sharing knowledge and collaboration in your support organization that ultimately helps you improve efficiency, quality, and customer satisfaction. Successful KCS implementation is easier said than done. Apart from training your team, there are advanced technology and tools available in the market that you can use to help them adopt it.
Takeaway
If your agents don’t perform well, neither will the contact center. Agent performance doesn’t solely depend on the agent or their training. Technology plays a crucial role in helping your support engineers give their cent percent. Furthermore, it aids communication and provides managers the data they need to analyze agent performance and mentor them for an elevated service experience.
Need tools to measure and improve agent productivity? Contact us!
SearchUnify is an AI-powered enterprise search solution that turbocharges your support ecosystem and improves your agents’ productivity as well as experience. Want to see how SearchUnify can help amplify agent and business performance at your organization? Request a live demo today!
