Contact Center Agents Happen to Be the Face of Your Industry!

Contact center agents are at the bottom of the pyramid in the customer experience journey. Still, when a customer calls in, they happen to be the face of your industry.

They are expected to know everything you offer, they get paid the least, and their work is policed the most.

Everything works against them to be the performer you desire the agent to be. They are the most stressed people when it comes to delivering customer experience.

According to a Forbes study, the reasons for their stress are:

• 26% mentioned finding the right answers to customer questions
• 25% mentioned different systems and information sources, giving different answers
• 20% mentioned hopping from one application window to another
• 14% mentioned it was hard to keep up with all the new information and changes
• 15% mentioned other issues

When you look at these findings, a good process and a technology platform will help address 85% of the stress, making your agents tick and thereby enhancing the customer experience.

Let us look at how you can engage and empower your agents to remove stress and make the superstars of your customer experience function.

Organizations with agent engagement and empowerment practices outperform others in terms of customer satisfaction by 70%. They achieve a 2.3x greater annual improvement in agent productivity, a 2.4x yearly improvement in customer profit margins, and a 2.3x annual improvement in customer spending.

Right Information and Tools

A stressed agent is most likely to leave your organization. Studies show that contact centers have a 38% annual attrition rate.

Let us conservatively assume that the cost of agent attrition is INR 100K. For a 1000-agent contact center, we are INR 3.8 crores annually.

Imagine that with the right technology and tools, you would empower your agents and improve engagement. They would be able to learn and access information easily, making them less stressed and saving millions in contact center attrition.

Implement an omnichannel platform with one view of the customer across channels and interfaces, irrespective of the channels that customers choose to interact with.

This would involve integrating the contact center platform with CRM, ERP, and other best-of-breed IT systems, besides integrating all the customer interaction channels.

With this, your agents would be able to access all the information about the customer through the click of a button.

Voice Analytics

When you run voice analytics on all the stored calls, you will be able to identify the customer’s concerns and expectations. You can rapidly analyze call recordings to identify compliance issues, misselling, privacy issues, new requirements, and training needs.

This would allow you to improve your engagement with the customers and figure out opportunities to upsell them.

Let me give you a couple of use cases for which we used voice analytics in the BFSI sector.

Identifying Self-Service Options

When the pandemic struck, the call volumes at a bank’s call center went up drastically. They were moving their agents to work from home, and the call volumes were increasing. So, the time they took to resolve customer queries went up, which made their customers unhappy.

They decided to automate their processes to handle their customer queries better. There wasn’t any consensus on what could be automated. Voice analytics of their calls revealed the commonly asked straightforward transactional queries, and they took those up for their first level of implementation.

This helped the bank set up self-service tools on their digital platforms. It brought down the number of calls that the call center was receiving, and it helped in addressing their customer queries faster and better.

Compliance Issues

Insurance selling is a regulated industry, and you will have to make sure that the customer understands all the required disclosures during the sale. Besides, you can’t incentivize a customer during the insurance purchase.

One of the insurance firms was reaching out to many prospects, but the sale closures turned invalid. When the voice analytics platform assessed the recordings, it glaringly revealed that the sales reps were not reading the required disclosures during the sale. This is a red flag process, and the sale loop wasn’t closed.

It also allowed the insurance firm to figure out the specific reps who weren’t doing this and helped create a training plan for those agents.

Is Technology and Process the Answer to All Your Customer Experience Problems?

An omnichannel platform means you need more than an average agent to leverage it fully. More than half the contact centers use nine or more channels for customers to interact with them.

This means the need for empowered agents is more pronounced now than ever before.

There is a common myth that with the rise of digital channels, the role of an agent is less important. That couldn’t be farther from the truth. With the rise of digital technology, the human element has become key to making sense of all the changes that are happening.

Agent empowerment programs are crucial, and they include the right technology tools, training, and mentoring programs, as well as proactive monitoring to identify areas of improvement. These would equip your agents to succeed in every interaction and eliminate any friction in the experiences you provide.