5 WEM Strategies To Promote A Better Customer Experience In Call Centers

As companies in each industry increasingly compete on the basis of customer experience, “customer centricity” has become the dominant slogan of modern companies. However, a total customer focus overlooks the key ingredient in any recipe for outstanding customer experiences: highly engaged employees.

In fact, the research shows that employee experience (EX) drives the customer experience (CX). CX leaders have 60% more committed employees, and only a 5% increase in employee participation can generate a 3% increase in revenue.

Gartner predicts that by 2020, the agent’s commitment will be the key differentiator for one in five contact centers. Contact center leaders are leveraging new tools and technologies to empower agents with better information, smarter jobs, inspiring feedback and empowerment of control over their careers.

WEM Emerges As The New Paradigm Of The Contact Center

Workforce Engagement Management (WEM) focuses on what agents actually do to improve their satisfaction: eliminate charges and facilitate their work; give them control over schedules, work patterns and their own development of skills; and show the value of your work by connecting the performance of the contact center with high-level business goals and metrics.

Calabrio has prepared a report explaining 5 WEM strategies to promote a better customer experience in call centers, boost agents’ commitment, improve retention and optimize the development of skills to design better experiences:

1) Give Agents Greater Control Over Working Modalities

In the professional world, studies show that employees who feel they have greater control, flexibility and freedom in their jobs are more satisfied and more productive. This is even more relevant in the contact centers. How?

• Involving agents in scheduling schedules: the new WEM platforms allow agents to indicate and adjust availability through a simple user interface. This fundamental step makes shift programming a collective activity, improving morale and at the same time reducing programming conflicts and ensuring that all shifts are covered.

• Offering changes in real time: WEM solutions allow exchange offers in real time. This allows supervisors to respond immediately to changes and unscheduled agents to claim open shifts and opportunities to earn extra money.

• Enabling flexible work modes (remote agents): cloud-based contact center technologies are a real game changer for remote agents. Secure and reliable connectivity from anywhere makes remote agents more viable and profitable than ever, allowing call centers to free agents to telecommuting.

2) Invest In Continuous Agent Workflows

Future-oriented call centers are investing in new agent tools that eliminate tedious burdens while providing better information to simplify complex interactions. Not only do they minimize the “headaches” of the agents; they equip them to be better at what they do. How?

• Implementing unified agent panels: agents report that the impossibility of accessing all applications and information on a single platform is one of the main frustrations. Cloud-based agent platforms solve this critical point, providing a single, centralized control panel that puts all applications, work and information within reach of agents, without the need to move from one window to another and navigate through disparate systems.

• Using omnichannel platforms: the best call center platforms of today are designed to integrate each and every one of the channels, offering agents a unique view of all the relevant customer information.

• Using automation to handle FAQs: while consumers indicate an increasing preference for self-service, AI-controlled “chatbots” will not replace human agents in the short term. In contrast, AI and automated self-service can handle frequently asked questions that represent the majority of call center interactions.

3) Empowering Agents With Self-improvement Tools

Instead of traditional career paths, millennials want constant feedback, seek continuous personal development and improve their talent. How?

• Facilitating agent feedback in real time: leading contact center technologies use advanced analysis to allow real-time evaluations and predictive scoring of each individual customer interaction. This provides agents with immediate comments and objective metrics that allow for self-directed performance improvements.

• Benchmarking and gamification: the same analytical capabilities allow call center leaders to create performance benchmarks at the individual and team level. Innovative analysis tools connect benchmarking with metrics in real time to drive healthy competition among agents.

• Social learning: the leading contact center platforms involve agents in continuous social learning, identifying the characteristics of successful interactions, problematic points of frequent interaction and other points of view.

4) Get Intelligence With Leadership

Today’s intelligent leadership requires the incorporation of advanced analytical capabilities that allow supervisors to see each interaction, revealing powerful and transparent knowledge about the performance of each agent, as well as the call center as a whole. How?

• With new and better metrics: as call center leaders increasingly value customer satisfaction and customer experience above operational goals, many are hampered by traditional metrics that focus on efficiency of interactions with customers. Analytics-driven technologies allow contact center leaders to move away from transactional metrics and focus on customer needs and feelings to get a more accurate picture of agent performance.

• Through objective and transparent evaluations: the new analysis tools that evaluate 100% of the interactions between agents resolve this problem, while at the same time they bring a new level of objectivity and transparency that generates trust and respect for the leadership of the contact centers.

• Facilitating an agile and personalized training: the advanced analysis tools allow the call center leaders to easily identify the personalized training opportunities on the key points of improvement of the agents.

5) Demonstrate The Commercial Value Of The Contact Center

Call centers see proven benefits in employee satisfaction and loyalty: a McKinsey survey of contact center agents found that 70% of those who plan to remain in their current position say they strongly identify with their company’s mission. How?

• Connecting call center metrics with business objectives: advanced, easy-to-use analytics tools allow you to see the full picture of how the contact center drives key business objectives. Providing agents with a transparent view of these connections helps them see how their daily work and their continuous improvement play a direct role in the success of the business.

• Making the CX metrics satisfactory: low waiting times, first call resolution, consistent customer satisfaction scores and other call center data points provide clear evidence of the organization’s commitment to delivery of outstanding experiences. Highlighting these metrics helps contact center agents take pride in their work, boosting commitment and morale.

• Listening to the Voice of the Customer (VoC): the analysis of VoC is one of the hottest trends in call center technology. But those same tools can listen to the Voice of the Employee (VoE). VoE analysis gives call center leaders a vision of agents’ daily work to improve the identification of opportunities and invest in technology or training to improve the agent experience.

In conclusion, by raising the agent’s experience, contact centers can feed the experiences of the next level of clients that will define the most successful companies of the future.