Susannah Richardson highlights 5 key steps to increasing blended agents’ satisfaction – and improving overall customer satisfaction.
Recent research has found that nearly 50% of agents are expected to handle up to 15 calls per hour, as well as handle other forms of interaction.
To achieve this, agents have to independently sign in to an average of 3 or 4 different business applications, which is both complex and time consuming.
It is therefore not surprising that only a third of respondents believe their agents are satisfied with their roles.
Here are 5 steps you can take to increase blended agents’ satisfaction:
1. Prioritise your traffic based on agent skill and channel type
Blending, queuing and routing multi-channel communication with priorities based on agent skill, client SLAs and channel type can reduce the complexity for the agent and allow them to provide a higher level of customer service.
They will no longer have to juggle with several different channels – and customer enquiries will be answered within minutes rather than hours (or days).
2. Provide a single view of the customer
Agents need to be able to answer customer queries quickly and efficiently – and to do this they need a single, clear and up-to-date view of the customer.
Having all customer data on one user interface allows the agent to increase first call resolution and customer satisfaction – and feel more in control of the process.
3. Make sure their desktop can be customised
As different agents deal with different types of queries and campaigns, and work across multiple channels, the desktop needs to be flexible in meeting these changing demands.
A desktop that is limited in functionality is not only frustrating but also means agents then have to use different systems at different times, creating complexity and confusion.
A flexible desktop can help to change the way the agents work and the productivity within the contact centre.
4. Integrate different communication channels into one system
Having an underlying contact centre solution that can integrate all the existing features of a traditional contact centre such as ACD, IVR and call recording, as well as social media, text, email, chat and voice can help to improve the way your agents deal with customer requests.
Instead of having to work between different systems and channels, communication is brought together to make life a lot easier for the agent.
5. Support agents as they try to resolve customer enquiries
Susannah Richardson
Although trained in answering different types of business enquiries, an agent will not always know the answer to every question.
Providing a knowledge base to assist with customer queries can enable an agent to draw upon extra resource and knowledge – providing a more confident and complete service to the customer.
Implementing these simple steps can have a noticeable impact on agent satisfaction, which in turn can increase your customer experience and satisfaction.
With thanks to Susannah Richardson at mplsystems
Author: Megan Jones
Published On: 5th Nov 2014 - Last modified: 22nd Mar 2017
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