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Why Digital May Be Stressing Your Agents Out

- Asynchronous: With digital interactions, there are often significant gaps between the customer's and the agent’s communications. Consider, for example, a customer who sends an email then heads out of the office for lunch or for a long weekend. Even if the agent responds promptly with a request for more information or a clarifying question, it could be a few hours—or days even—before the customer replies. The agent involved in the conversation may change as a result, and the interaction itself can move from one channel to another (for example, from phone to email or from chat to a voice call).
- Immediate or deferred: Agents now handle both immediate response contacts, like phone and chat, and deferred response contacts, like email. This increases the complexity of the job they’re being asked to do.
- Interruptible: If your contact centre gives priority to one channel over another, for example by asking agents to handle immediate response channels before deferred ones, you’re not alone. When one interaction can be interrupted in favour of another, contact centres must decide whether (and when) one chat or channel should take precedence and how to handle interactions that move from one channel to another.
- Simultaneous: Many contact centres now ask agents to interact with more than one customer at a time—for example, texting with one person while chatting with another and keeping tabs on social media.
How to Mitigate the Effects of Digital Channel Overload
Organizations can help manage cognitive load in a few key ways:- Set load per type of contact. Video chats, for example, have a higher impact on cognitive load than other forms of interactions due to the extra effort required to send and interpret nonverbal cues, Stanford researchers found.
- Track employee load-based performance data and consider whether the metrics you have used in the past are the right metrics to measure performance in the new, digital world.
- Establish a maximum capacity per employee (both in terms of overall total and per type of contact) and make cognitive load limit adjustments to individual employee contribution. A one-size-fits-all approach won’t work here, because each employee is unique in their ability to juggle interactions.
- Leverage tools with algorithms that ensure that “low” loads do not take precedence over “high” loads, that dynamically define load per type of contact and that automatically adjust employee capacity as needed.
- Adjust base staffing requirements and optimize schedules as required.
- Combat employee disengagement with virtual forms of gamification and additional huddle/coaching sessions.

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Author: NiCE
Published On: 1st Oct 2021 - Last modified: 5th Oct 2021
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