The overall success of any company is driven by the customer experience (CX) it provides. And the contact center remains at the heart of it.
A contact center’s performance can reveal a business’ weaknesses or opportunities that affect how it stacks up to the competition. And the foundation of a truly great contact center are the CX employees.
As employee expectations rise and the competition for talent continues to increase, agent experience is more important than ever for driving next-generation customer experience.
Know Your Barriers
Contact center agent retention is critical to achieving strong operational advantages and customer satisfaction yet remains a weakness for many. The key to reducing turnover is to zero in on some of the causes. Agents leave contact center jobs or the industry as a whole, for many reasons including:
- Contact center jobs often are viewed as temporary positions with limited growth potential. Consider how you can turn this narrative around by providing training and growth opportunities to mitigate this perception within your contact center.
- A typical agent’s work is becoming more difficult as the “easy” tasks are handled by customer self-service and AI-driven support options, yet training has not kept pace with increased demands for complex inquiries.
- A disconnected multichannel customer journey leaves agents juggling disjointed toolsets and multiple information sources to resolve requests.
- Common monitoring and management tools may overlook many agents’ skills and strengths, leading to frustration and disconnect between agents and management.
Empower Your CX Workforce
Underlying each of these challenges is a common thread: Traditional contact center models aren’t keeping pace with today’s customer-centric business world and it’s ever-evolving interaction channels. Experience transformation needs a strategy.
Getting a holistic understanding of experience — from how data is managed, the tools in use and not in use, where and how agents work, agent coaching and training programs, and performance monitoring — is central to improving CX strategy. Digital transformation alone isn’t enough. Putting the right insights into the hands of the right people — at the right time — is mission-critical.
To improve contact center agent retention, consider taking the following steps.
- Streamline your tech stack and unify your data so that agents have access to tools that are intelligent and adaptive with customer data all in one place. Bonus: unified data helps all levels of the organization.
- Provide ongoing training and upskilling to give your contact center agents new opportunities and clear growth paths.
- Use artificial intelligence (AI)-driven tools to not just handle basic inquiries but also to provide agents with real-time speech monitoring and coaching that help predict customer needs and provide context-relevant information and suggestions.
- Provide quality, bias-free feedback consistently for agent growth and success. Agents need both real-time feedback and coaching based on more than just key performance numbers. Real-time prompts and tips that suit how they work can empower them to learn and grow. Speech-to-text analytics can provide deeper insights into agent and customer well-being than traditional contact center metrics alone.
- Be a champion of transformation. Top-to-bottom organizational alignment ties it all together. When your company-wide goals are clear and engrained in the processes and tools you deploy, your agents can see how their role ties into the greater success of the company.
Employee Experience Equals Customer Experience
When companies build an internal culture that values employee experience as part of customer experience and empowers them with the right tech tools, it becomes the backbone of a high-performing contact center that not only retains great agents, but also delivers transformative customer experiences.
One SuccessKPI customer, a global hospitality company with 24 contact centers in 12 countries and nearly 10,000 customer center agents, recognized a critical opportunity to optimize what it saw as the key to a loyal customer base: the contact center. In addition to rapid global growth that added to the cost of operations, approximately 7% of customer voice interactions resulted in consult calls to an internal help desk of approximately 400 agents — a number well above industry standards.
The company seized the opportunity to reduce contact volume and handle time reduction by replacing its on-premises stack with the cloud-native insight and action platform to equip the global team. By using intent data captured through SuccessKPI, the hospitality company automated agent coaching and prioritized business-level opportunities.
This resulted in a reduction of assist call volume by 30% to industry standard, an increase in FCR and agent satisfaction, and an annual savings of over $2 million to the organization.
To learn how the SuccessKPI all-in-one insight and action platform can help you improve your agent experience and build a stronger organization from the ground up, visit the SuccessKPI listing in the Genesys AppFoundry® Marketplace.
