54% of contact centre managers put empathy as top agent skill
New research by ContactBabel has found that empathy – the ability to see another’s point of view – is seen as being the most important characteristic of successful contact centre agents.
“The UK Contact Centre Decision-Makers’ Guide”, a major study of over 200 UK contact centre operations, has found that 54% of respondents stated that empathy with customers is the no.1 most important attribute for a contact centre agent to have.
This far outweighs more task-focused abilities such as sales ability or multi-tasking, or even positive behaviours such as reliability and teamworking.
Table: The top 3 abilities or characteristics of a successful contact centre agent
The report’s author, Steve Morrell, commented:
Steve Morrell
“The picture painted of successful contact centre agents is that of a versatile, reliable good listener – nothing flashy or highly strung, nor a simple automaton happy to plod on doing the same thing for hours.
“Empathy is a characteristic which is hard to learn, and which is ripe for identifying in the recruitment phase through personality testing, for example. Empathy is important for an agent to display in order to make the caller feel that someone is listening to and understanding them, and that they are trying to solve their issue, rather than just seeing the caller as a nuisance. As such, empathy is vital for improving customer satisfaction and loyalty, cross-selling and up-selling.”
Tweet28 Oct 2009
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Comments on: 54% of contact centre managers put empathy as top agent skill
We have just launced the Axia Profile in the UK, based on Nobel Prize nominated research it identifies a persons value tallent. Our first major UK client is a times 100 best employer and multi award winning call centre. Through many years of research in the US the profile has developed outputs specific for sales and customer contact centres and has defined 30 key tallents needed. The benchmark we completed confirmed this survey, over 90% of the top performers had great access to the 5 elements of empathy we deem as important in sales, intuitive insight, attitude to others, eveluating others, persuading others and relating with others. Those that were continually at the bottom of conversion charts scored significantly lower in all 5 of these areas
Posted by Nigel Griffiths — 29 Oct 2009 @ 2:46 pm
I agree that empathy is critical in diffusing angry calls and building rapport. However, it can be expressed in a number of ways -tone, verbal nods and active listening -summarising etc. An apology is also helpful to show empathy and understanding when things go wrong but is separate from sympathy -which never ends well for the organisation or the customer!
Posted by Carolyn Blunt Training Expert — 29 Oct 2009 @ 11:54 pm
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