How can you improve the customer service standards of your agents?
"Customer service standards are the key benchmarks for customer satisfaction". In this blog let's discuss in detail how to improve customer service standards of your agents.
In today’s competitive market, customer expectations have become more demanding, and businesses must expand and evolve service channels to stay competitive. One way to tackle this challenge is to satisfy your audience and build brand loyalty with clear customer service standards that focus on speed, technology, and thoroughness. However, the key to enhancing the quality of your customer experience lies in enhancing the agent experience.
Popular research has indicated that more than 60% of contact center agents lack the necessary technology to address customer service challenges. Approximately 34% say they lack the necessary data while addressing a customer. Today’s agent churn rate ranges somewhere between 30% to 45%. Many researchers have stated that happier agents are well-informed, internally collaborative, patient, and deliver better customer service.
Contact center agents are under extreme pressure to pave the way for businesses to build long-lasting customer relationships. Now is the right time to analyze and strategize your customer service standards and help your agents improve the customer experience by creating a more profound impact.
For businesses to attract the time and attention of customers, they must raise their agent customer service standards. Here are some tips on how to improve customer service standards of your agents:
Maximize your agent performance with AI
So, how does AI help improve agent performance for a better customer experience? Contact centers can maximize their agent performance, create happy customers, and cut-down costs by using AI capabilities to deliver agent guidance in real time. Contact centers use text, speech, desktop, and journey analytics to capture data and use AI capabilities to analyze and monitor real-time agent conversations. Agents get timely guidance from AI capabilities to create happy customers and bring client loyalty.
“More than 80% of the contact center leaders feel the use of AI and chatbots have made their contact centers much more effective.”
The firms that use AI capabilities to empower agents with real-time assistance have experienced a three-time increase in customer retention rate. Contact centers can properly align agent activities with their CX goals by using AI to monitor agent performance and show the areas of improvement to meet customer expectations.
Improve your agent productivity by routing calls to the right agent
Generally, customers are wary about connecting with agents who take a long time to understand their problems or deliver delayed solutions to their queries. To improve your customer service standard, always ensure the routing of customer calls to suitable agents. The use of personalized agent routing based on criteria like agent skill sets, priorities, customer sentiments, anomalies, user language preference, etc., promises a consistently high quality of service to your customers in every interaction. Agents can minimize the time taken to diagnose issues, bringing quicker query resolution and reduced average handling time.
Monitor your metrics and analytics
Organizations can prioritize and identify valuable customer interactions using contact center analytics. Agents can spend less time on repetitive tasks and more on strategic tasks and identify problematic customer touchpoints, loopholes in information, and areas for process improvement shared through channels. Agent analytics provides deeper insights for the management and gives a detailed analysis of the agent’s performance that can be used to identify flaws in the workflow.
“More than 90% of contact centers believe that customer journey data analytics is a crucial function of the contact center.”
According to McKinsey, companies applying advanced analytics have reduced their average handle time by 40% and increased self-service containment rates by 20%. The standard metrics of agent analytics are First Call Resolution (FCR), Average Handle Time (AHT), Abandonment rate, service levels, Customer satisfaction, ACW, and much more. Contact center AI is the fastest, most accurate, and most efficient tool for analytics. Measurement of analytics will drive your customer service agents to deliver an enhanced experience for customers.
Implement continuous training
Many global corporations have understood the importance of investing time and money in offering consistent training to their agents to help them acquire new skill sets and increase productivity.
Small and medium-sized businesses can opt for innovative agent training methodologies to improve productivity and remain competitive. This can include creating new training assets, periodically refreshing stale material, developing and administering the test for agent certifications, and sharing best practices. A call monitoring feature in their contact center platform also empowers supervisors to listen to the calls between agents and customers and provide active support. By including empathy in training initiatives, your contact center can help agents better understand how customers feel after interacting and work towards increased customer satisfaction.
Create an internal Knowledge Base
Customers look for better service quality from contact centers, and a contact center knowledge base helps you with it. “Almost 72% of the consumers expect the agent to know who they are and have knowledge of their previous interaction when contacting customer service.” Knowledge base software brings all the information and data together and assists your agents in finding quicker solutions for complex customer issues. Implementing a contact center knowledge base to improve customer service has many benefits.
- Improves FCR
- Improves AHT
- Reduces agent errors
- Ticket deflection
- Assists in training
- Decreases support costs
Ensure a supportive work environment
Agents require the right set of resources for effective functioning during customer interactions. According to a Salesforce report, more than 54% of agents admit that internal departments such as marketing, sales, and customer service fail to share information internally. To overcome this situation, you can begin by questioning your agents about the processes or tasks that were quite difficult to manage. With a unified omnichannel dashboard, you can support your agents’ work through easier collaboration across multiple teams. Having a transparent flow of information will eventually boost your agent retention.
Elevate the experience for at-home agents
With rising query volumes and anxious customer behavior, agents find it hard to balance work and life. “Globally, more than 50% of customer service leaders feel that the mental health of their agents becomes affected.”
There are a few challenges when working from home, like effective monitoring and collaboration. Deploying customer support software that enables agents to collaborate seamlessly across teams irrespective of their location will help contact centers deliver fast, personalized, high-quality service to customers while giving them more flexibility.
Empower agents with the right technology
Contact center agents and managers need specific tools to deliver efficient customer service. When agents use complicated IT systems or processes, their productivity gets affected. Having to toggle between multiple databases, CRM software, or helpdesk tools can slow down your agents in resolving customer queries. Approximately 38% of the customers expect the agents to know about them and have complete knowledge of their problem at their first point of connection. Empower your agents with streamlined workflows and automate tasks to connect the customer with the right agent. When you simplify the task of your agents, they have higher chances of delivering an enhanced customer experience. Simply put, it makes information more accessible and helps agents avoid frustration.
Get started with Sensiple to revolutionize your customer service agent’s performance!
We combine the best contact center strategies with the right tools and advanced technology to transform your customer experience. Our conversational AI, Jenie, can strengthen your contact center’s self-service capability by delivering 24*7 customer support with personalized, proactive, human-like conversations.
Contact us today to learn how our contact center solutions with digital and AI capabilities can improve customer-agent interactions and help you delight your customers with exceptional service.
