How To Improve Agent Productivity Of A Call Center?

The agents are the biggest asset in any call center. However, agent rotation is considered the number one challenge for contact centers. The leaders of call centers always look for ways to invest in agents: hire the best, train them, train them better and retain them for longer providing them with well-being and the stability of teamwork. A higher productivity of the agents is a proven formula to promote a better motivation of the employees and, therefore, retention.

Next, we will present some tips to improve the productivity of agents in the call center.

How To Improve Agent Productivity Of A Call Center?

1) Automate With Intelligence

With the proliferation of channels, user interaction volumes and complexity increase. The role of the agent is becoming one of a “super agent”, a person who can solve complex questions and problems. It is important that agents focus on high-value work while automating simple, everyday tasks. Therefore, it is necessary to invest in the automation of robotic processes to automate repetitive tasks, such as updating multiple systems with the same data. Thus, the investments in self-service artificial intelligence that can learn about the user, provides a first level of service and provide more context to the agent to move from self-help to live help.

2) Promote Proactivity

Proactive notifications in multiple channels can significantly reduce the number of live interactions, especially when there is a system disruption or other systemic problems that can affect most users. This, in turn, will help agents avoid simple, repetitive but critical updates for each user.

3) Achieve An Omnichannel Convergence

The greatest motivation for the agents is to solve the problems of the users. With omnichannel solutions, agents not only have the ability to respond to users’ questions through different channels, but they also make users focus on the channel that best solves their query or problem.

An agent can chat simultaneously with multiple users on multiple channels, as well as taking advantage of more than one channel at a time in a given situation. Agents can move the conversation to voice and use both channels, chat and voice as needed. This is a truly productive environment with multiple confluences and, most importantly, it provides the flexibility for the agent to solve the user’s problem.

4) Unify The Agent’s Desktop

Agents usually work in 3-4 different applications and end up spending up to 25% of their time searching for data on all systems. Providing a single desktop with a unified interface with no problems in all applications, as well as integrated data flows can offer capabilities such as configuring data in an application and taking advantage of it in many other applications.

The integrations of CRM are always considered the most important and significant, since they have all the customer data. But there is value in the integration of many of the business systems that have customer data such as ERP, order management and many more. In addition to that, there is value in integrating the unified communications application to connect with various experts throughout the organization, as well as analytical applications that offer more information about customers.

Another important application that stands out is in which agents spend a lot of time, which are workforce optimization solutions. Having those that are unified with the agent’s desktop allows them to bid in turn or to carry out training from the same unique interface from which they interact with users. The integration and unification with each application makes the agent even more productive and efficient.

5) Take Advantage Of Analytics

We must take advantage of analytics whenever possible so that agents are more productive and effective. Infuse analysis everywhere and look for areas where agents invest more effort and time than necessary. For example, obtaining real-time information on various KPIs could help to take action in real time, improving agent utilization, productivity and effectiveness.

Agent productivity not only results in employee satisfaction, but also drives user satisfaction. Happy agents create happy users and vice versa.