Make 2020 the Year of the Agent

For the past several years, everyone has been focusing on the customer experience. Delivering a good – if not great – customer journey is crucial for building or retaining market share. Customers expect to be treated well at every point of contact. So, it’s no surprise that the customer experience has emerged as a key component of contact center strategy. And yet, too often, centers continue to fall short on delivery. The time has come for a new perspective.

If you want to improve the customer experience, focus first on the agent experience. Let’s face it, good agents are hard to find, much less retain. And it’s likely those you have are overburdened. Their jobs have gotten more complex while their desktops are getting messier with limited (or no) good resources to answer their questions. This unfortunate reality impacts performance on many fronts – training time, time to proficiency, handle time, error rates, and yes, even attrition.

We cannot make great strides in the customer experience unless we put the time, effort, and dollars into improving the agent experience. Most centers tackle “employee engagement” by focusing on factors like culture, leadership, pay structures, career paths, and communication. Those are all important considerations. And yet bottom line: You can’t engage and empower employees until you unburden them.

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Technology can provide relief from the challenges they face while simultaneously helping them:

• Feel like a part of a team with a good purpose
• Tie their work to organizational goals
• See measures of their success
• Have the right information and tools at their disposal to succeed at the assigned tasks
• Know where and how to get the help they need
• Have the opportunity to grow and develop to contribute more

Technology plays an important role in starting agents on the path to success. (Click on image to enlarge.)

A variety of tools help agents succeed and engage. (Click on image to enlarge.)

A brainstorming session with my team identified some great ways technology gets used to enhance employee engagement:

• Use advanced visualization tools that provide colorful, easy to understand feedback on how we’re doing, and how I’m doing
• Let agents self-evaluate calls (using call recording and QM)
• Automate QA scoring with speech analytics (making it more fair and balanced)
• Give agents direct access to a portal where they can see their schedules and request schedule changes
• Use a Unified Agent Desktop to provide a “cockpit” that matches their tasks and workflow
• Leverage Robotic Process Automation to provide agent assistance on routine tasks, guide them through complex tasks, and trigger follow up tasks
• Speaking of bots… invest in chatbots or voice bots to help customers self-serve
• Distribute scorecards appropriate to every level, including Execs outside the center, that show how the center is doing and how it is contributing to the business goals
• Use Instant Messaging and Collaboration tools for communication (not just email)
• Offer ongoing training modules, tied to development goals, delivered to the desktop at a scheduled time
• Invest as much time and energy in Voice of the Employee surveys as the company does in Voice of the Customer surveys!

Want more ideas? Spend a few hours walking in your agents’ shoes to see what life is really like for them. Or, convene some focus groups to get their feedback on how they’d spend the company’s money to improve their on-the-job experience and performance. I like to offer up a hypothetical budget of $1 million to get their juices flowing! Ask them what they’d do to make agents happier and, in the process, improve the customer experience.

For more information, download our latest article from Contact Center Pipeline entitled Want to Improve Employee Engagement? Technology Can Help! »

Source: https://www.strategiccontact.com/blog/2019/12/make-2020-the-year-of-the-agent/

2021 Buyers Guide

Get Listed

Telecoms

 

1.)

Cloud IT Services GmbH Dialfire Dialfire offers you a complete call center solution that is simple and intuitive to use and adapts to your needs. It's completely cloud-based, saving you the hassle of setting up a phone system and installing software. In addition to predictive dialing and call blending of inbound calls, you can create personalized campaigns through an intuitive and easy-to-use interface. Features include automated workflows and full control over the agent screen. You can see the full list of features here: https://www.dialfire.com/info/features

2.)

Cloudonix Cloudonix’s smart voice calls enable frictionless experiences that drive better customer care and faster sales by merging voice and data into a complete service context. Cloudonix add Cloud capabilities to your existing on premise Call Center enabling your agents to work from anywhere in the world. Security, Privacy and more – rapidly deployed and cost effective without replacing your existing systems or retraining your team. https://cloudonix.io

3.)

Connectica Solutions, LLC PBX On The Cloud We provide complete Cloud-based PBX/Phone Systems, including predictive and progressive dialers, phone lines in more than 75 countries and low cost international rates. We specialize in the US and Latin American market. PH: +1 (346) 444-3555 http://pbxonthecloud.com

4.)	Layer One Technologies Layer One Technologies provides information and communication technology (ICT) services to businesses in the greater Charlotte area. Whatever your cabling needs, we have you covered. PH: (980) 288-4800 https://www.layeronetechnologies.com/

5.)

Megacall VOIP services Stay in contact quickly and easily with your international offices through Megacall. Megacall will fulfill all your telecommunication requirements and on top of that go the extra mile and surprise you with new possibilities for your business, speed to action your requests and keeping within your budget. 📞 Virtual Switchboard 🔌 SIP trunk 🔢 Virtual number 📠 Call Center Solutions PH: +34 952 667 511 https://megacall.es/

6.)

NetSapiens SNAPsolution Our SNAPsolution – UC and Collaboration tools – can be quickly deployed so you can realize your ROI just as quick. netsapiens offers a comprehensive suite of unified communications (UC) & Contact Center (CC) feature-sets to service providers. Custom-built to provide our partners with unprecedented levels of flexibility, customization, and ease of use. netsapiens allows you to control your margins in order to improve your ROI. As a provider of a facilities-based solution, you are able to personally choose your origination, termination, hardware costs, etc. to fit your budget. We also allow you to strategically price your product for a maximum return on your investment by charging on a conc... (read more)Our SNAPsolution – UC and Collaboration tools – can be quickly deployed so you can realize your ROI just as quick. netsapiens offers a comprehensive suite of unified communications (UC) & Contact Center (CC) feature-sets to service providers. Custom-built to provide our partners with unprecedented levels of flexibility, customization, and ease of use. netsapiens allows you to control your margins in order to improve your ROI. As a provider of a facilities-based solution, you are able to personally choose your origination, termination, hardware costs, etc. to fit your budget. We also allow you to strategically price your product for a maximum return on your investment by charging on a concurrent call basis instead of charging per-seat or per-feature. SNAPsolution, SNAPvantage, and SNAPanalytics give you all the tools to start off strong in the VoIP industry while giving you room to grow efficiently within your means. Why Sessions, Not Seats? The era of the mobile workforce is upon us. In fact, Google recently put out an estimate that 80% of the global workforce is now performing deskless work every day! Unfortunately, when it comes to providing Unified Communications (UC) features to these deskless employees, many systems operators, carriers and service providers are stuck investing in their platforms on a per-seat basis. That limits them to chasing only about 20% of the workforce - those with actual seats and desks. Why not expand your addressable market and open your business model to chase up to 5 times as many clients as you are today? If a majority of the workforce today doesn’t have a desk, does it make sense to purchase the UC solutions you want to sell by the seat? We don’t think so. That’s why we’ve created this report titled Sessions, Not Seats. In it, we’ll show you why finding a UC platform, like our SNAPsolution, that charges for sessions instead of seats is the way to go. PH: 7608463385 https://netsapiens.com/

7.)

Nuxiba Technologies CenterWare Build a strong business presence and improve customer relationships! Offer custom-tailored solutions throughout your sales cycles and customer interactions and assess service levels and control corporate goal achievement through reports and statistics. Obtain detailed reports based on relevant activity in your contact center, access our quality module to assess calls and performance, apply surveys, develop scripts, record conversations, and more! Schedule a live demo or request a quote today! https://nuxiba.com/en/telemarketing2.html

8.)

Televergence Long Distance and Toll Free Specialists for Contact Centers Televergence is a facilities based US Nationwide High volume/High Capacity Inbound and Outbound VoIP Carrier for Contact Centers. We specialize in termination (outbound) and origination (toll free and local DID) for the contact center. We have a technical staff that is up to date on the majority of platforms in use today, including asterisk and Vicci dial, as well as many of the currently in use software platforms. Contact Centers generally see cost reduction and containment when using Televergence as their contact center telecom carrier. Televergence is the only active US VoIP carrier certified by the Women's Business Enterprise National Council (WBENC), which enables our services to qualify for meeting corporations Supplier Diversity Needs. PH: 213-943-2023 https://www.televergence.com/home

 

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