Are You Investing in Your Agents?

Nigel Dunn argues that agents should receive the very best if you expect them to please your customers.

What is the problem with contact centres? Well, typically staff are treated pretty poorly.

I’m sure you wouldn’t care about giving great service if you felt conditions were poor, you had to ask permission to go to the toilet or you had endless focus on call statistics… All whilst being cramped into small offices with loud background noise and using antiquated equipment to do your job?

Half of contact centre workers in the UK use a headset that is over 8 years old

Well over half of contact centre workers in the UK (and there are upwards of 1 million) use the same headset that is actually over 8 years old.

In that time, contact centres have moved on immeasurably in terms of dynamics, technology and growth.

74% of contact centre staff think they have poor tools for the job

Yet 74% of contact centre staff think they have poor tools for the job, according to our ‘GenM 2013: One Year On’ report. This leads to lack of motivation, which leads to poor service.

Most company structures have their CEO or MD at the pinnacle of the organisation, who receives a higher salary, nicer working environment, more benefits and all the gadgets you could shake an iPad at. At the bottom are contact centre workers who get very few of these things.

As an MD, you wouldn’t want to speak to a customer via an outmoded tube microphone of an old headset, yet it seems acceptable for their agents to do so, thus providing an ‘ok’ customer experience in the process.

The ‘risk’ of change may incur down-time

Yet contact centre agents talk to customers every minute of every day using these outdated audio devices.

Why? It’s not because a better headset costs more – it’s because the ‘risk’ of change may incur down-time, meaning call stats can’t be achieved for that day, week, month. Those dreaded KPIs again.

Hello! Contact centre workers are your brand ambassadors, interfacing with your customers around 20 million times a day in the UK and Ireland. Why would anyone waste that opportunity to impress so many people?

There is also bottom-line impact. If each unhappy customer tells nine others, the cost of that lost customer is huge. It costs 5 times more to win a new customer than keep an existing one, so why do companies risk losing customers by treating contact centres as low grade?

Customer experience – that’s the point. If the customer is greeted by an uninterested person whose sole goal is to get them off the line quickly, then it’s really no surprise that contact centres have a poor reputation. It’s also a huge missed opportunity and money wasted.

The last 3 feet between the contact centre worker and the £ millions of system, telephony and infrastructure is usually what counts most in terms of user experience.

A poor experience is all the customer will remember

Speaking to an unmotivated agent or having a poor audio experience is all the customer will remember – and they don’t actually care how expensive your workflow system, CRM or call logger was.