Why More Agents Aren’t Always the Answer, and What You Should Do Instead?

You’re running a customer service team, and the pressure to handle more calls or close more tickets is mounting.

What do you do?

The immediate thought that strikes you is to hire more agents. After all, more people means more output.

But is that the best approach?

Unfortunately, it’s not!

Surely, hiring more agents might seem like the best solution, especially when you are using a customer experience platform that allows you to make unlimited calls at a fixed price.

Now, it might just sound right.

What about the hidden costs that come with expanding your team?

Let us break this down for us to understand this better:

• Hiring costs – every agent needs to be recruited, which takes up time and money. You have to pay for your job ads and background checks and spend time interviewing and identifying the right candidate – it all adds up.
• Onboarding and training – once you hire them, they need to be onboarded. After that, you have to train them. Training doesn’t come free – you have to invest in materials, trainers, and time. Besides, agents need time to learn, and they won’t be productive for a few months.
• Operational costs – more agents mean more desks, computers, headsets, and space. Would you agree they eat into your budget?
• High attrition – the contact center industry is known for its high turnover rate. You’ll need to keep replacing agents who leave, repeating the hiring and training process all over again.

So, while an unlimited calling plan sounds great on paper, when you add these costs, it gets expensive really fast. Now, you will realize that the costs don’t seem fixed anymore.

Besides, if your current process is inefficient, you’re just multiplying the inefficiency by adding more agents.

Have you considered getting more out of your team instead of hiring more people? Sounds like a win-win, right?

How Do You Improve the Productivity of Your Agents?

Ensure that every call you make counts, and that is a fundamental place for you to start. How do you go about doing it? Let us look at some of the tips.

Tip #1

What percentage of your agent’s time gets spent in handling mundane activities?

It would be about 70%. With automation and intelligence, you’d be able to automate mundane activities, freeing up your agent’s time for what really matters – helping customers. This way, you would make every call count.

Tip #2

No two agents are the same when it comes to their performance, right? There are a few who will crush it, and a few will lag.

How do you help those who lag?

To do this, you need to understand what is causing the lag. Is it an improper understanding of the product or service, an inability to access the tools available, or a plain capability issue?

You can understand this by running real-time analytics on the calls and other interactions and pulling out the reasons for their not-so-great performances.

Accordingly, you can put together training programs to help them come up to speed in delivering value to your customers. That would help make every call count.

Tip #3

How often have you transferred your customer calls from one extension to another or some other department?

I am sure you have done this often.

Not many customers like this, and if the issue doesn’t get resolved, the customer experience gets worse.

Imagine having a workforce optimization solution in place. It would automatically route calls to the best-suited agent, cutting down wait times and boosting resolution rates. Would you agree that this would result in happier customers and making the call count?

Tip #4

How often have your agents felt that they are not equipped or do not know how to address customer queries?

This can be really frustrating.

With a feature like agent assist, your platform can provide suggestions, prompts, and insights as the conversation happens. It would make even your junior agents look and sound like pros.

What more? You can even prompt a supervisor to barge into the call to help the agent resolve customer issues.

Tip #5

Have you come across scenarios where your answerability ratios are low, and due to this, your agents are not able to reach more customers?

Do you have advanced dialing capabilities to ensure that all your agents are busy speaking to customers? That would directly increase the number of productive minutes and, in turn, the outcomes.

Imagine if you can increase the call time from 3 hours to 4.5 hours. That’s a 50% productivity increase.

So, the focus should be on improving productivity and making every call count rather than increasing the number of agents.

Hiring more agents can help in the short term. Still, without addressing the challenge of productivity, you’ll find yourself in the endless loop of hiring, training, and managing more people than necessary. 

With a focus on productivity, you will get the most out of your agents by optimizing their time, reducing mundane manual tasks, and providing real-time insights and support.

Besides, if your platform offers pay-as-you-go functionality, you’ll not be stuck with a bloated team and unnecessary infrastructure costs. You only pay for what you use.

The next time when you want to hire more agents, ask yourself this question: Am I really making every call count?