Using Contact Centre Agents As Key Business Consultants

Agents are often, if not always, overlooked when it comes to the interpretation of your Voice of the Customer (VOC) data. Managers are always quick to review the data through their limited lens of experience and often find it challenging to identify ‘real root cause’ of feedback scores. Similarly, external consultants often only see the “CSAT Scores” posted on a wall in the canteen. The agents hear everything in real time, they feel the raw emotion through the sarcastic quips and angry statements, and therefore should be considered your most valuable resource. Don’t view them as a cost centre, they aid cost reduction and generate revenue.

There are many ways in which you can unlock the consultancy potential of your contact centre agents. Ask them to complete post-call surveys to gain an understanding of what is going on, or use a more thorough speech analytics approach: the latter has the benefit of using technology to actually listen to your contact centre, in fine detail. Identifying what is going on, with tactical solutions, which can help to fix broken processes in the Customer Journey.

There are methodologies to Voice of the Contact Centre (VOCC) – just like there are to VOC – that go way beyond focus groups. When both are incorporated into the operating rhythm of a contact centre, they can help with product development, effective marketing and the streamlining of processes.

Using VOCC and VOC together will provide robust interpretation and understanding of your customers’ needs, plus, most importantly, it will give those needs real context. You will find out which departments are causing the issues and how to proactively address improvements. Having the most experienced contact centre consultants (that is, your agents) on tap and sufficiently engaged to provide you with the voice of the call centre can truly accelerate management’s understanding of what is happening in your business. Combined with clever contact analytics technology, your contact centre and its agents can be the force that drives the change you need to become more successful, compete in your market and ultimately thrive.