How Skilled Are Your Agents?

Jesse Wells answers the key questions about how and why to upskill agents.

Because of the growing challenges of finding, training, and retaining qualified employees, increasing agent skill has become a key objective of many of today’s contact centre managers. While it certainly requires time, effort, and investment to upskill an existing team, the benefits to your business can be substantial.

Are you considering an initiative to increase the skills of your existing contact centre workforce?

Here are three important questions to consider as you weigh the pros and cons of this strategic decision:

1. Why do you need more highly skilled agents?

Questions are more complex: As technology provides more self-service options through the web, the questions coming into the contact centre are becoming increasingly complex.

Banking is a perfect example. While 71% of all transactions are completed through the web or a mobile device, the CEB Tower Group found that 80% of all problems are resolved through the more personal channels of click-to-chat, in-person branch visits, and phone. This demands a set of highly skilled contact centre agents, and the ability to route calls to these specialists.

Agents have more autonomous decision-making powers: To sustain a high first call resolution rate and an improved customer experience, agents must have the ability to do something about customers’ problems. No one wants to call into a contact centre and hear, “I can’t do anything about this. Let me transfer you to my manager.”

In fact, nearly 70% of contact centres, according to a Dimension Data study, are empowering and authorising agents to use their own judgement to use either fully or partially predetermined decision options.

Omnichannel visibility requires cross-channel skills: As customers are communicating with your company in increasingly complex ways, agents are being called upon to have skills in multiple channels. However, research has shown that only 32% of agents were handling transactions from a variety of channels.

Learning cross-channel skills is a win for agents because it adds variety to their daily work, but it’s also a win for your organisation because of increased productivity and efficiency from agents who can jump from phone to email and back as the workload fluctuates.

2. What benefits can be derived by improving agent skills?

Reduced agent turnover: Almost without exception, agents want to know that there is a growth path for them, and it’s to your benefit to provide them with one, rather than have them move to your competitor to find it.

Increased potential to up-sell: “Telesales operators, who have traditionally focused on the uncomplicated sale of easy-to-understand commodities, are going to have to increase their knowledge base and learn to sell solutions to buyers who are more demanding, more knowledgeable, and with higher expectations,” said Sue Barrett at The Thinking Organisation.

“This shake-up means a radical rethink for telesales operations. Smart companies will see their telesales teams as a vital part of their overall sales operation.”

In other words, it requires comprehensive product knowledge and sophisticated skills to go from an order-taker to a salesperson, and beyond as a customer experience agent.

Insights shared across the company: As the contact centre is more relied upon as an accurate voice of the customer, an increasingly important part of the sales force, and the centre of omnichannel visibility, contact centre agents will be called upon to collaborate with the marketing, sales, and technology management teams.

Analytics and insights derived from the contact centre have been shown to drive product development and influence marketing campaigns. “The days of smiling and dialling are over,” as Loris Dumanian of Sun Life Financial pointed out in a recent webinar about solving communication challenges.

Improved customer satisfaction:  “The way you treat your employees is the way they will treat your customers,” said business mogul Richard Branson. UPMC, an award-winning medical centre in the United States, noted that their focus on satisfied employees was one of the reasons they were able to deliver such an outstanding customer experience.

3. What are other contact centres planning for their employees?

Dimension Data found the most common skill set improvements being made are to define a career path, implement a mentorship programme, and deploy knowledge management tools to assist in training.

And yet, analysts are finding that the link between employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction is still not well understood, and employee satisfaction is underrated as a key driver of contact centre agent development.

Dimension Data was surprised to find that the proportion of organisations failing to measure the benefit of training has actually increased. A surprising 46% did not understand the relationship between training and productivity improvements, while 48% were ill-informed as to whether training directly affected customer satisfaction.

With thanks to Jesse Wells at Genesys