9 Roadblocks to Excellent Call Center Agent Experience

The efficiency of a contact center depends on one very important and key factor: the experience of its agents. When teams are satisfied with their jobs, feel fulfilled, and are driven, they can give exceptional customer service. When they are fatigued, overworked, and disgruntled, their performance suffers, and so do your key performance indicators.

You may enhance both agent and client engagement by making a few adjustments to the way you operate your contact center. In this article, we identify 9 roadblocks to excellent call center agent experience and how to tackle them.

Agent experience is a comprehensive assessment of how engaged, effective, and productive your agents are. While most contact center leaders are caught in a whirlwind of apparently competing goals and cutting costs, prioritizing your agents and investing in them is the best way to expand your business, taking your performances to the next level. This will also keep your clients happy and satisfied.

An excellent agent experience will provide:

• Increased client satisfaction with extensive customer knowledge and quick problem resolution.
• Improved agents’ retention, who feel engaged and valued for their work.
• Enhanced efficiency by focusing on employee experience and company needs.

Call peaks are a huge mental burden for your agents. They can lead to burnout, poor performance, low KPIs, and absenteeism. How to tackle this problem?

The first step is to determine the peak hours and the causes of peak calls. Examine periodic call peaks: when do your consumers call you the most during the day and week? Is there a seasonality to your activities that repeats year after year? Adapt your structure and the availability of your agents to deal with these periods of high demand.

Internal sources of call peaks may also include acquisition campaigns, commercial news, departmental dysfunction, absenteeism, etc. Highlight these sources of high-volume calls so you can prepare for them and modify your resources accordingly.

Another solution is to Install an effective IVR Interactive Voice Response system on your phone line. You may use the IVR to qualify a call before the caller picks up the phone. This allows the client who calls you to select from the available alternatives. They can use the IVR to define the reason for their call or the service they require, such as buying guidance, delivery follow-up, technical help, after-sales service, or a complaint.

The IVR can manage a high number of concurrent calls, reducing the number of persons waiting in line. Once the request has been qualified, the customer is automatically forwarded to the relevant team or agent. The IVR can also provide answers, allowing it to handle multiple inquiries without the need for human/agent interaction.

Handling high numbers of requests becomes challenging without the proper structure. Messages arrive from many channels, with varying subjects and languages… Handling them manually may be time-consuming, expensive, and detrimental to client satisfaction and customer experience. And that’s where skill-based routing comes in.

The first step in overcoming these challenges is to examine your contact center traffic to determine the criteria by which customer requests should be routed.

Two such criteria can be the language or subject of the request. Reorganizing contact center agent teams based on skill sets rather than channel type improves the way requests are handled, breaks down silos, and allows for better organization in your contact center. Requests may now be automatically redirected based on abilities and availability.

Regardless of whether the request comes in via phone or message, it will be sent to the appropriate call center agent. This also provides for smoother task distribution if one channel receives more requests than another.

Working in a call center can be tedious at times. In many situations, agents adhere to a set of predefined, frequently prepared replies and processes, making their employment feel dull and repetitious. Because of these processes, agents may become stranded and unable to assist critical consumers.

Giving your agents some autonomy in their approach to customer service and some latitude to make their judgments may significantly influence their productivity. They improve their abilities, frequently feel like they’re genuinely helping, learn to communicate better with clients, and become more capable of thinking for themselves.

One strategy to empower your contact center agents is to use tools like templates to offer contextualized messages to agents, allowing for brief but thorough replies.

Much of your agents’ time is wasted on simple, repetitive activities, such as searching for client information across several platforms, repeating the same answer to the same query, etc. All of this squandered time equals greater fees for your agents. All of this wasted time equals greater corporate costs and poorer agent satisfaction.

Freeing agents’ time allows them to focus on higher-value tasks like upselling. The organization will be able to produce profit possibilities, and agents will spend less time on monotonous activities, making them feel more valuable.

At the same time, customers nowadays want to be able to conduct some tasks on their own, which is encouraging businesses to integrate self-care technologies. Customers can use this strategy to complete simple activities such as changing their contact information. This also explains why chatbots and self-service solutions are becoming more popular.

A good call center agent must be prepared to make sound decisions on behalf of your contact center. The more self-sufficient they become, the more at ease they will be in offering day-to-day solutions and maintaining long-term client experience.

Don’t allow boredom set in when it comes to training your call center agents. By altering and customizing your training sessions, you can ensure that you keep your operators’ attention. If your agents do not feel involved, they will not recall the tactics and tips you try to teach them.

Involving the management of your company’s various divisions is one of the finest strategies to assure the effectiveness of your contact center agents.

Suggest that they meet regularly to address any issues or sorts of calls that have proven particularly challenging for your contact center personnel to manage. They will undoubtedly bring important keys to better train your agents for this sort of call or to point them in the direction of superior response components.

Contact centers have a significant quantity of data on their clients in the age of big data. This might include contact information, hobbies, career, and so forth. All businesses retain vast volumes of data, but extracting actual consumer insight from these databases is significantly more difficult.

The solution? Integrating your contact center solution with other systems, such as your CRM, provides your agents access to all of the information they need to operate efficiently. Furthermore, integrating technologies that automate operations such as call wrapping saves agents time, letting them focus on customer care rather than unpleasant administrative work.

The fundamental approach determines what data is relevant for your campaigns and their goals.

The integration of all digital channels that fit the demands and expectations of customers and deliver a consistent experience regardless of the channel the customer uses to communicate with businesses is referred to as omnichannel. This is an opportunity but also a challenge for contact center agents.

For example, the same person can contact a firm by email and then follow up via their Facebook account a few hours later. As a result, agents must react twice to the same issue if these two inquiries are not recognized as coming from the same user, wasting time and raising expenses.

Agents can find their strengths by being trained to deliver customer support across numerous channels, allowing you to improve routing depending on their communication channels. This also enables your customer care staff to give higher-quality service, which increases customer happiness. These advantages enhance the overall job experience, sense of achievement, and agents’ productivity.

Agents must feel appreciated and valuable in a company to be engaged and driven to accomplish their tasks properly. Investing in your contact center agents with the right technologies, such as Cloud Contact Center Solution (CCaaS), will help your organization perform better and retain personnel. Begin by applying some of these suggestions and exploring the advantages of operating an omnichannel contact center to maintain constant morale and productivity.

Agents are motivated by personal development, career progression, and monetary rewards. If you fail to provide all three things for your employees, you will find it challenging to retain them or attract new talent into your business!

Ensure that you have clear career paths for all roles within your company so that staff knows where they can go next instead of being stuck in one position forever. Your team should also be rewarded for performance which means paying bonuses throughout the year depending on what has been achieved during those periods (e.g., Christmas time, etc.).

If managers don’t support their teams’ efforts to provide excellent customer service, it will be very difficult for agents to achieve their goals. Call Center Managers should encourage their teams by giving them opportunities for growth and development within the organization while providing regular feedback on performance so they know what needs improvement before problems arise later down the road!

Choosing a cloud solution specialized in customer relationship management provides a positive experience for your customers and agents.

Indeed, Cloud Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) solutions enable the centralization and aggregation of the many contact channels desired by customers (Phone, Social Media, Webchat, SMS) to offer a fast and precise response. However, CCaaS benefits not only the customer but also the agents: reduced stress, less time lost looking for a conversation history, and so on. Choosing such a solution is a win-win situation.

From a pure agent standpoint, CCaaS Solutions allows:

• Efficient data management: Choosing a contact center as a service solution allows you to consolidate interactions with a particular consumer by accessing his request history. This improves the contact process by preventing the consumer from repeating his queries on each phone call, resulting in enhanced follow-up by the agents.
• Increased flexibility: Because of their high adaptability, CCaaS software enables companies to face the current difficulties of customer relations while allowing contact center personnel to operate remotely outside the company’s premises.
• Improved automation: Contact Center agents benefit from CCaaS in their regular job. They are less inclined to conduct monotonous work with little additional value due to automation. They no longer have to move between interfaces to complete their tasks. The CCaaS software makes all information available in a few clicks from anywhere.

If you’re looking for a CCaaS solution to manage all communication channels, customer data, and metrics while also delivering an excellent customer and agent experience, NobelBiz Omni+ is the answer!

NobelBiz Omni+ is a proper Omnichannel Cloud Contact Center Solution built with fast and easy installation with a browser-based, user-friendly platform that enables a seamless transition across the diversity of channels it supports. Our solution brings excellency to your agents’ experience through:

• Unified Console: Provides an enhanced agent experience with an accessible, single-screen work environment with built-in support for all features.
• 360-degree view of the customer: For a better employee experience, you may have instant and guided access to the history of your client interactions.
• Integration of third-party communications platforms: Integrate third-party communications platforms to use your technology through a single interface and improve the employee experience.

NobelBiz is a Cloud Contact Center Solutions Provider focusing on building breakthrough omnichannel call center software while also delivering a one-of-a-kind telecom carrier network meant to accelerate both inbound and outbound Call Centers worldwide.