No more doubts about the importance of keeping your agents motivated: the way your operators engage in their work, how they feel during the day, and how they organize their daily activities is often underestimated but these aspects definitely influence how they interact with your customers. Rather obviously, happy agents make your customer happier. Gaining more autonomy and feeling like they can really make the difference in helping customers, agents will be more productive and motivated. How can you help empower them?
Let’s analyze together 6 tips for enhancing your agents’ performances:
- Train your employees and create a team culture – According to recent research, 68% of customers claim that agent’s empathy is essential in customer service to make them more satisfied with the support they receive. For this reason, your agents must be solutions-focused and they must be trained to use positive language and to communicate clearly with empathy. Specific training courses could make them feel more comfortable during conversations with customers, pushing beyond their bounds of patience and practicing proactive and active listening. Preparing your agents to deal with peaks of stress and complex tasks can make the difference: from the business point of view, making your agents motivated and able to manage any issues customers may call for, will mean having them conscious of how valuable their role in the company is.
- Give operators the right UC tools – Agents must rely on a UC platform that helps them to perform at their best every day and to provide a top-quality service. They need to be supplied with appropriate, easy, and intuitive tools to properly welcome customers in a satisfactory way. Having customers’ historical records at hand, and having the opportunity to quickly leave notes or involve in the issue of other stakeholders within the company – through a CRM integration – can make the difference for them, possibly increasing the first call resolution rate. Advanced UC solutions also help decrease stress and customer frustration. This crucial aspect is detailed in the next bullet point.
- Ease the access to shared information – Listen to your agents to understand what they need to improve their performances. Being able to rely on shared information and multichannel resources will help agents be effective in their job. It is unthinkable that, during a conversation with a customer, your agent puts him/her on hold several times to search and collect all the information needed to have a wider picture of the issue he is in charge of solving. Agent workflow must be smart and all the information needed has to be available in a few clicks.
- Grant employees adequate beaks – Allow your agents to manage their availability manually both for after-call work activities and for short breaks, especially when they work from home (read more about remote customer service tips in this article). The software you use to manage incoming calls must give them the possibility not to receive calls during these absences. Missed calls negatively impact agents’ performance rate, so this can be a displeasing source of stress for them.
- Share with agents their performance KPIs and give them goals and periodical feedback – In order to improve or maintain a high customer service quality standard, your agents should be updated on how they are performing and briefed on how this data is interpreted: if operators can see their KPIs directly in a dashboard inside the platform they use to manage calls, they can understand by themselves how to enhance productivity, increase their efficiency and better handle customers’ requests. Motivate them with goals to increase their performance KPIs and give them your feedback about their job and customers’ feedback about the service they have provided.
- Purposes and rewards are better than penalizations – As said before, you might motivate your employees with goals and rewards but it’s crucial you don’t burden agents with the presence of a supervisor, who controls their activities and performance through a dedicated dashboard view in the UC platform they use.. Do not sadden them for their errors but give them the chance to admit them and give them a second chance… Remember that their opinions are as important as yours: listen to them and give them hints. Working in customer service can be sometimes monotonous but making agents feel like they are making the difference for the company and for your customers, will do good both to your staff’s determination and your business.
Keep in mind that empowering agents’ working activities and the tools they use impact directly on the customer experience, increasing contact center productivity and efficiency. These aspects must be coexistent because both are critical to your business’ success.
To go deeper into how a cloud contact center could help your agents check our product page Mida C3 page.