Contact centres face a growing array of media to handle increasingly diverse and complex customer interactions. Customers present high expectations for stellar service, and real-time response with rapid resolution and spot-on answers.
At the same time, centres must find ways to squeeze more out of the workforce without risking burnout and turnover. It's a tall order, but one that can be addressed effectively with today's tools and process optimisation.
The tools and processes to optimise agent performance are multifaceted - addressing the desktop to handle the contact, and performance tools to measure and monitor. The desktop includes knowledge management and scripting, as well as agent assistance tools. A performance tools suite includes quality monitoring, workforce management, customer feedback and coaching tools. Another key ingredient is a strong feedback loop that uses those performance tools to drive actions that the individual and team can pursue for overall optimisation.
How does a centre get the most out of its agents in today's complex, demanding world, without risking burnout and turnover?
An agent's job can be incredibly stressful. A company can reduce the stress by enabling and empowering agents to play more of a subject matter expert role with proactive mentoring and with the right tools at hand. The benefit is that it allows agents to focus on what can be fun about the job - helping people.
A powerful reason for providing these tools is the high cost of agent turnover to the business as a whole. Not only is it expensive to continue hiring and training new agents, a possible intangible cost is damage to a company's brand from unprepared agents interacting directly with customers.
Many centres measure internal views of performance, but fail to look at the customer view. How does a centre balance agent performance optimisation with customer experience optimisation?
Sometimes companies become so wrapped up in what they're doing that they forget the customer's viewpoint. It's important to respond as quickly as possible to optimise performance and customer experience. It may mean having a supervisor call a valued customer back that same day to try to repair the damaged relationship, which means a company needs to have configurable alerts that come in as soon as the customer survey is completed. It's important to note that a company wants to apply rules on how often to offer surveys, and best practices in how to construct the survey so that it isn't too long. Otherwise surveys can just seem like harassment.
An agent's job can be incredibly stressful.
Dave Paulding is Interactive Intelligence's regional sales manager for UK and Africa.
What other indicators do agents have about, “how am I doing?” from a performance perspective?
Agents and supervisors can get real-time alerts to make them aware of whether they are on track or not in key performance areas. These alerts go right to the desktop and can be configured to highlight particular target areas of improvement. Supervisors can easily see who the lowest performers are by reviewing real-time stats and historical reports. It's best to work with the agents as the problems crop up instead of waiting for a performance review, especially if their performance problems could potentially impact customers.
Even though we've come very far, centres still face the age-old problem of putting the right number of people with the right skills in place at the right time to handle the workload. What can centres do differently and better with today's technology?
The all-in-one systems today make configuration and updates to data, such as agent skills, less onerous. Correct configuration is essential for proper scheduling to ensure that the right people and skills are available when the interaction arrives. Today's technology is also in a much better position to track demand and skills needed across different interaction channels. Another area that has improved is the tracking of customer satisfaction ratings, which helps contact centre management assess agent performance and reinforce training and coaching programmes.
Most centres still handle the majority of their contacts from phone calls, but the landscape seems to be changing with increasing e-mail volumes and more Web sites offering chat. How will agent performance optimisation evolve as the media mix changes in centres?
Apply structured processes to the metrics, quality monitoring, and customer satisfaction for all media. Don't assume different interaction channels can be scored exactly the same way against the same criteria. Be sure to address unique characteristics of each channel. Typing, written grammar, spelling, use of pre-built responses in e-mail and Web chat should be considered in an evaluation. Keep in mind that how an e-mail or a Web chat is handled is also part of the company's brand, and the customer experience should be viewed in that light.
To conclude, where the contact centre and its agents can be empowered to more actively assist customers, the agents are likely to be more motivated. Nothing can fire up agent performance more than the feeling that they really can have a positive impact. It might involve reporting back to other departments regarding feedback the contact centre has gathered, or it might include other departments gradually turning over specific functions to the contact centre.
Either way, it allows agents to participate more in what the organisation does and have a sense of accomplishment at the end of their workday, which is what all employees need to stay motivated in their jobs.
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