Empowered Agents Provide Better Service

Paul Thomas explains how empowering your agents could help to boost employee engagement.

The world we live in today is more customer-centric than ever. For businesses this means contact centre agents are in a position of immense pressure, as they are the primary touch point with many customers.

As a result of this, they’re integral in shaping the customer experience from the outset. The key trend running through the whole industry today is the huge shift from companies calling the shots when it comes to engagement – doing it the way they want – to the customer having more power over how they want to be served than ever before.

As customers are calling the shots, we’re seeing a rise in automated self-service. Automated self-service, when implemented correctly, can solve the more simple problems more quickly than waiting for a live agent.

Self-service makes way for a more skilled team of agents

If problems are getting resolved without the need for the customer to call in, it makes way for a smaller, more skilled team of agents who have more varied responsibility and a more diverse skill set.

Given the evidence, it’s somewhat surprising that the perception of an agent has still not moved much away from being thought of as undesirable in many socio-economic groups of employable people.

The unfair and often stereotypical view of agents (often perpetrated by the media) is that they’re micro-managed, over-monitored robotic drones, who must handle calls as quickly as possible to ensure they hit (near impossible) key performance indicators (KPIs).

Typical key performance indicators (KPIs) that you would have found in contact centres over the last 10 to 20 years might include a high volume of calls answered and low call-handling times. But, as is increasingly becoming apparent, this isn’t always an enabler of good customer service, and it might prevent the agent from actually being able to help.

Intense performance pressures are the root cause of high attrition

These working environments and intense performance pressures are often the root cause of the high attrition rates this industry is renowned for.

High agent churn rates have a negative impact on a business for a number of reasons. It means managers are constantly having to focus on recruitment drives to replace staff and, as well as on-boarding and training, it takes them away from their other responsibilities.

This consumes both time and money, and prevents investment going into existing staff. The direct and indirect costs of replacing an agent could amount to an agent’s annual salary. As the average agent turnover rate is around 35% (according to Dimension Data), it can cut into company profitability very quickly.

A business that is losing experienced contact centre agents risks providing a lower quality of customer service, as new recruits don’t have the experience that agents with five years’ experience under their belts have. Keeping existing staff guarantees a consistent, high level of service that is likely to increase customer numbers.

A change in job responsibilities could help to retain staff for longer

A change of attitude in job responsibilities for agents could be the long-awaited transformation the industry needs to retain staff for longer and provide a clearer path for development and progression.

One of the biggest challenges faced by managers today is ensuring that agents are stimulated and challenged in their everyday work.

The antiquated, vague KPIs that are only fed back to agents at intervals no longer work. In fact it’s visibility that is an increasingly important factor, so agents know how they and their colleagues are performing.

This has the potential to encourage agents to be self-aware of their own work, and could bring the competitive nature that you would traditionally see on production lines right into the contact centre.

Establish a career path to remove the notion of a “dead-end” job

Mapping out an established career path for contact centre agents will take the away the notion that they’re in a dead-end job. Furthermore, it will attract a high calibre of applicants who pick up skills faster, and help you retain the skilled agents you already have.

Even small changes, such as referring to agents as ‘game changers’ or ‘subject matter experts’, as opposed to agents, will ensure they feel their job purpose has more value, as these job titles denote inspirational individuals who are positively impacting people’s lives.

Companies have claimed for years to be customer-centric, but now’s the time for managers to recognise the strengthening link between the role of the agent and the customer.

Customers no longer want to expend the amount of effort they used to in order to engage with a company – the progression of self-service as an option is testament to that – but when they do, they want it dealt with quickly and to their satisfaction.

The agent should be the last resort; the expert in their field that can (and will) resolve the query. The only way this is going to be achieved is by throwing out the rulebook.

With thanks to Paul Thomas at Aspect Software