Top 5 Tips to Motivate Contact Center Agents

Your contact center agents are your company’s face to the outside world. They’re your frontline to your customers, the ones you trust to maintain those critical buyer relationships.

But their jobs aren’t easy ones. And those roles are vulnerable to high turnover. It takes a special mindset to field complaints and calls, day after day. Without the right support, jobs like theirs can be physically, psychologically and emotionally draining. You don’t want that. You want your agents to feel energized. You want the interactions they have with your customers to be positive ones. And you want those agents to be your longtime employees.

It’s not as hard as you might think to keep your contact center agents happy, motivated and committed. Here are the top five tips based on our experience helping customers with their workforce engagement efforts.

Entrust agents with more autonomy and authority.

If you’re truly committed to a superb customer experience, you want your frontline agents empowered to deliver solutions—not just answers—on behalf of your company. The quicker your customers receive helpful, definitive information or decisions, the happier they will be. And the less runaround an agent has to go through to provide this information, the happier the agent will be. But this shift takes trust and flexibility, on both sides—here are a few ways to shift gracefully.

• Train your agents appropriately, and continuously.
• Have faith—with proper training you provide—agents will make responsible, reasonable decisions on their own.
• Make sure agents know it’s okay for them to make occasional mistakes, so they trust themselves and you.

Eliminate obstacles from their daily tasks.

We all know how mind-numbing and frustrating it can be to face the same problem time and again, with no end in sight. Or to stumble through an overly-complex process. Contact center agents are no different. Tasked with an already difficult job, agents quickly can become demoralized and unmotivated when asked to follow workflows that don’t make sense to them. So help them out.

• Find and remove obstacles that over-complicate their processes.
• Simplify workflows.
• Stop doing what’s no longer necessary, relevant or meaningful.
• Better yet—involve agents in your streamlining project, and take their suggestions to heart.

Keep rewards simple and frequent.

The most appreciated or memorable rewards are rarely the most expensive ones. Simple, creative, lower-cost rewards delivered more frequently often generate better results. So do something extraordinary but easy—create fun contests to recognize superstar agents. A few ideas:

• Have a middle manager cover the phone while the agent takes a coffee break.
• Award a monthly, reserved parking spot.
• Publicly recognize agents for above-and-beyond work.
• Reward superstars with additional time off or small, cash spiffs.
• Come up with your own crazy, creative ideas to find out what inspires your team.

Advance agents’ careers.

Not all contact center agents have the same career aspirations. And—since most contact center agent roles are entry-level—agents typically welcome advice and mentoring on how to advance their career from managers or more senior peers.

• Find out where they want to be a year or two from now, and work with them to map a path to get there.
• Learn what their professional interests are, then help them understand how to apply those interests to their current or desired role.
• Help them develop not only their practical workplace skillsets but also their emotional intelligence, aka “soft skills”—communication, assertiveness, conflict resolution, etc.
• Build their aspirations—is there something they want to do but doubt their ability for some reason? Help them reach beyond what they think are their limitations. Develop a plan to help them overcome any shortfalls they believe they have.

(Bonus: while you’re making agents more productive—and more marketable—you’re also grooming your next level of senior contact center employees.)

Connect with them on a personal level.

Everyone craves connection. It’s a basic human need. Frontline employees tend to feel undervalued, so they in particular need connection.

• Find out the most interesting thing about each person you manage.
• Find out what motivates them.
• Then make those connections in conversations with them. Build that bridge.

Source: http://calabrio.com/blog/top-5-tips-motivate-contact-center-agents/

2021 Buyers Guide

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Speech Technology

 

1.)

Agara Agara is an autonomous virtual voice agent powered by Real-time Voice AI. It is designed to have intelligent conversations with your customers, vendors, and partners without any assistance from human agents. It can handle a wide variety of calls including inbound customer care calls, outbound lead generation calls, appointment scheduling calls, and overdue payment recovery calls. Agara is available for several industries including banking, insurance, retail, e-commerce, airlines, and telecom. Powered by advanced Real-time Voice AI that understands speech in real-time, automatically determines the right process to follow and guides the caller along in the process with natural conversation. PH: +1 (512) 333 4634 https://agara.ai/

2.)

Call Center Studio Call Center Studio Call Center Studio is the world’s first call center built on Google and is one of the most secure and stable systems with some of the industry’s best reporting. It is one of the most full-featured enterprise grade systems (with the most calling features, one of the best call distribution, outbound dialing features and integrations—including IVR, AI Speech Recognition, blended inbound/outbound calling and includes Google’s new Dialogflow and Speech API. Call Center Studio is the absolute easiest to use (with a 10 minute setup), and is the price performance leader with lower equipment cost and less setup time. PH: +1 512-872-7565 https://callcenterstudio.com/

3.)

Call Tracking Metrics Execute automated actions based on words spoken by your customer. Our intelligent word detection and transcription tools make it easier for you to decipher the content of your customer conversations and automate action based on those insights. Transform the audio of your calls into speaker-organized scripts so you can easily search your call log for specific words from a conversation, or automatically detect when words of intent are spoken by your customer. Listen in on and highlight common patterns in order to execute triggers to initiate a new action or workflow, such as emailing a manager if the word “cancel” is spoken on a call. You can also set up to automatically redact content from a transcript, such as sensitive health information transmitted on a call. PH: 8005771872 https://www.calltrackingmetrics.com/analytics-and-reporting/conversation-analytics/keyword-spotting/

4.)

Daisee Daisee Daisee builds technology that empowers people to solve problems by making interactions simple and smart so they can have a more significant impact, be more productive and be better at what they do. We believe incremental improvements carry huge potency and provide exponentially greater change for the better. Genesys customers can now automate risk and quality management using Daisee’s speech and sentiment analytics and remediation workflow software. Daisee helps improve customer experience, ensure regulatory compliance, identify missed commercial opportunities & training requirements as well as provide valuable insights back to the business directly from the frontline – the true voice-of-... (read more)Daisee builds technology that empowers people to solve problems by making interactions simple and smart so they can have a more significant impact, be more productive and be better at what they do. We believe incremental improvements carry huge potency and provide exponentially greater change for the better. Genesys customers can now automate risk and quality management using Daisee’s speech and sentiment analytics and remediation workflow software. Daisee helps improve customer experience, ensure regulatory compliance, identify missed commercial opportunities & training requirements as well as provide valuable insights back to the business directly from the frontline – the true voice-of-the-customer. Unlike legacy speech analytics providers that simply transcribe audio to text and use ‘word spotting’ (i.e building a database of synonyms for every use case - ‘angry’ and ‘manager’ as well as ‘upset’ and ‘supervisor’ and simply spotting for those words), the engine has proprietary use of its sentiment language – a University innovation developed at Daisee, resulting in far more accurate transcription, enabling derivation of the context of a conversation. The Programmable Scorecard™ scores every call, and automatically activates a workflow for low-scoring, high-risk calls in near-real-time so they can be immediately reviewed and remediated. As the solution is pre-trained out of the box, deployment is a matter of weeks, not months and there is no setup or professional services fees – just a straightforward SaaS based pricing model. Ensure 100% of your phone interactions are not only monitored but also analyzed and scored with high-risk calls triaged for fast review and remediation. PH: +61404697151 https://www.daisee.com/

5.)

Eckoh EckohASSIST Advanced speech recognition and natural language expertise that routes callers by simply asking ‘how can I help you?’. It allows customers to use their own words to ask for what they want and steers them to the right place. Menus are eliminated altogether and contact centres can use a single inbound telephone number. PH: 01442 458300 https://www.eckoh.com/customer-engagement-solutions/ivr-speech-solutions/natural-language-speech-recognition

6.)

MattsenKumar LLC SmartSpeech SmartSpeech – The Best In Class Speech Analytics Software An all-inclusive speech analytics application that enables you to visualize your audio using state-of-the-art speech recognition, transcription, and text analytics technologies. PH: +91 99026 10044 https://www.smartspeech.io/

7.)

Nemesysco InTone Suite - Emotion Detection via Voice Analysis InTone™ is a voice analysis tool geared to detect genuine emotional and cognitive reactions regardless of the speaker’s language or chosen intonation. It integrates into existing contact center environments and provides realtime indications of both client and agent emotional reactions throughout all ongoing calls. This unique set of indications assists managers and call center representatives to truly understand the client, improve call center performance, easily detect angry calls, elevate training efficiency and provide a tailored customer experience in every single call. Nemesysco's contact center technology is also available in API and SDK forms. Please visit our website for information about our product portfolio. PH: +972-9-9605894 https://www.nemesysco.com/

8.)

Voci Technologies Incorporated V-Blaze Speech to Text Our GPU-accelerated, AI-based technology enables you to deliver greater insights to the contact center by transcribing audio into analyzable text. - Transcribe large volumes of recorded audio quickly - Integrate transcripts with your analytics or business intelligence platform - Reduce your hardware footprint and minimize total cost of ownership PH: 412-621-9310 https://www.vocitec.com/speech-technology/v-blaze-real-time-speech-to-text

9.)

Voxjar Voxjar Voxjar is your one-stop-shop for driving better phone calls with your customers. We're a modern Conversation Analytics and Call Coaching Platform. - Custom Charts and Dashboards give you the freedom to analyze calls from the highest level down to the details of each conversation. - AI-Powered Speech Analytics transcribes, searches, and analyzes your reps' phone conversations, at scale. - Quality Assurance and Call Coaching tools let you evaluate and improve agent performance with a human touch. - Long term recording storage for historical analysis All of these together provide the holistic, easy-to-use software that you need to manage a modern call team and create better con... (read more)Voxjar is your one-stop-shop for driving better phone calls with your customers. We're a modern Conversation Analytics and Call Coaching Platform. - Custom Charts and Dashboards give you the freedom to analyze calls from the highest level down to the details of each conversation. - AI-Powered Speech Analytics transcribes, searches, and analyzes your reps' phone conversations, at scale. - Quality Assurance and Call Coaching tools let you evaluate and improve agent performance with a human touch. - Long term recording storage for historical analysis All of these together provide the holistic, easy-to-use software that you need to manage a modern call team and create better conversations with your customers. Voxjar brings value across all departments to improve Sales, Marketing, Customer Care, Collections, Compliance, and even your Product Team. Deep insights into each customer conversation will invigorate every corner of your business. Start today with a free 14-day trial https://voxjar.com

 

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