There are many factors that slow down agent productivity, such as high call volumes and staff turnover, both of which are very common in the contact center industry. Managers need to be aware of agent performance to ensure a good customer experience (CX). And this is linked to the productivity of the agents.

Tips and Best Practices To Improve Agent Productivity

Metrics are important for identifying operational and performance issues. Therefore, after observing the data, we must act accordingly. Below we point out some tips to improve agent productivity:

1) Offer Autonomy

Agents play a fundamental role in ensuring customer loyalty and satisfaction. As the first contact with a company, agents are the customer’s first impression of an organisation. Agent performance dictates how likely a customer is to promote a brand, among other things.

You don’t want to micromanage agents, especially if their performance is generally good. On the contrary, it is essential to empower agents by offering them autonomy through self-assessment and analysis, specific modules in the contact center and sharing historical data with them. This information helps agents feel more proud of their work and more in control of their results.

Important Contact Center Agent Performance Metrics Are:

• Give positive and constructive feedback.
• Create a culture in the call center where both managers and agents feel empowered to express their opinions.
• Give agents positive comments in public and constructive criticism in private.
• Providing valuable feedback improves the productivity of call center agents.

2) Invest in Agents

It is advisable to use centralised knowledge bases and provide easily accessible resources for agents to study on their own. Online content is increasingly popular and effective for knowledge transfer within contact centers. You must invest in continuous training for agents and reserve time for personalised training. In short, create learning opportunities for your agents to improve.

3) Offer Opportunities for Professional Growth

We know that call center agents have opportunities for lateral changes to different departments, as well as promotion potential. But it is management’s jobs to make sure agents are aware of those opportunities. For this reason, it is necessary to promote new roles such as supervisors and managers for agents. Professional growth opportunities improve call center agent engagement and productivity.

4) Offer Flexible Schedules

The post-pandemic work era has imposed hybrid remote work models. This is especially true in call centers; where between 60% and 80% of agents have switched to a work-from-home model. Teleworking may seem quite flexible, but it is not always. Each agent has specific programming needs. In addition, hiring a remote team is vital to improve the productivity of call center agents.

Conclusion

Call center agents have difficult jobs. With high call volumes, impatient customers, and learning curves with new technologies, it’s sometimes easy for agent productivity to decline. Using metrics to evaluate agent performance and productivity and addressing that data is key.

Technology is a great tool to improve agent productivity, but the human touch is always necessary. Engaging agents, investing in their careers, and offering them autonomy in their daily work will make it easier to achieve optimal results.

La entrada How To Improve The Productivity Of Call Center Agents se publicó primero en Enreach ES.

There are many benefits to meeting customer expectations, but there are also downsides when this doesn’t happen. In fact, in a survey conducted by Salesforce, 76% of customers indicated that it’s easier than ever to switch from one brand to another to find an experience that matches their expectations.

What Are The Benefits Of Meeting Customer Expectations?

1) Have a Regular and Honest Customer Base

What do all companies want? They want customers loyal to their brand. When an organisation meets customer expectations, their one-time purchase becomes a regular, and that’s cheaper. Because? Because according to Invest, investing in new customers is between 5 and 25 times more expensive than retaining existing ones. A customer wants nothing more than good service and if it is given, it will show brand loyalty.

2) Be Unique Among the Competition

According to Zendesk, after more than one bad experience, around 76% of consumers say they would rather do business with a competitor. By contrast, 72% of customers will share their good experiences with other users, according to Salesforce. This fact can make a company unique among the competition: worrying about the needs of its users.

3) Influence on Sales

Did you know that according to HubSpot, 68% of consumers indicate that they are willing to pay more for products and services from a brand that offers good customer service experiences? This explains the key importance of customer service. When a company meets customer expectations, the customer will continue to do business with the same company even if its costs increase. HubSpot Research also explains that 93% of customers are likely to make repeat purchases with businesses that offer excellent customer service, which means they will pay more if their feedback is shown interest.

How Do You Know What the Customer’s Expectations Are?

1) Asking For Feedback

According to the Harvard Business Review, 84% of consumers report that their expectations have not been exceeded in their last interaction with customer service. In these cases, it is convenient to ask customers what they want and meet their expectations.

For this, it is very useful to carry out telephone surveys through the Enreach IVR. IVR technology makes it possible for companies to contact customers immediately after serving them, since it allows organisations to automate calls to measure customer satisfaction through quality telephone surveys (rating from 0 to 10), thus exceeding the shortcomings of traditional methods to measure user satisfaction.

2) Analysing and Researching the Competition

Deloitte research shows that 72% of companies believe they can use analytics to improve customer experience (CX).

3) Asking the Customer Support Team

No one knows customers better than the team of agents who serve them, since they are the employees who listen to and resolve user queries and complaints. According to HubSpot, 73% of consumers say they stay loyal to brands thanks to customer service agents who practice active listening, are empathetic, and efficient.

With Enreach’s Omnichannel Contact Center Agent Module you will be able to serve your customers and meet their expectations. How?

• Connecting with your customers through their favourite channels: WhatsApp, Webchat, SMS, email, phone calls and via the web…
• Offering your agents a single web interface to manage all conversations. Thus, they will be able to serve customers from multiple channels, personalise messages with icons and rich texts, create predefined responses, type interactions, add notes, reschedule calls and transfer conversations. They will also be able to show their availability with customisable statuses.
• Connecting the OCC with your CRM and multiplying its power. Our service integrates with the main work of your agents and improves the experience of your clients. Manage your calls from your CRM, customise the flows, automate the creation of tickets, record call information, and create reports.

La entrada What Are The Benefits Of Meeting Customer Expectations? se publicó primero en Enreach ES.

Proactive customer experiences require leaders to not just react to their feedback, but use data, analytics, and user insights to predict what they’ll need next. Better yet is when agents have the right information and the right tools to meet those needs upfront. Leaders can now guide their teams in leveraging these insights to create proactive strategies that improve customer engagement.

Proactive Disclosure: A Crucial Tool

Proactive outreach involves reaching customers before issues arise and guiding them through the customer journey when appropriate. The ultimate goal is to anticipate customer needs to improve overall CX.

This type of disclosure takes many forms, such as personalised messages about a new service that matches your preferences, a future update, or a simple registration to measure your level of satisfaction. The key is personalisation: the contact must be made in a way that feels unique and tailored to each client.

3 Steps To Implement Proactive Outreach In A Call Center

1) Customer knowledge

You need to use data and analytics to understand customer behaviour, preferences, and the journey. Leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) can help forecast future actions and needs.

Companies have a number of opportunities to collect customer information. Tools like predictive analytics can be trained to anticipate customer behaviour and preferences, revealing the likelihood of actions such as churn risk, purchase probability, or response to marketing campaigns.

The Enreach Omnichannel Contact Center has a Statistics Module that offers the following functionalities:

• Visual graphs to analyse the service at a glance: Analyse the service you are offering and improve your results. Use the advanced filters to obtain only the information that adds value to your business. Review the KPIs, customer satisfaction, and average time of operations…
• Detailed information: With our reports you will be able to know detailed information about queues, agents and conversations. Filter by key tags, calendar, schedule, listen to the recordings…
• Nurture analysis by integrating our data with your systems: If you also have external systems to analyse large volumes of information, you can integrate our data and enrich your reports. Get all your reports through our API and include them in your BI tools, CRMs and ERPs.

2) Personalisation

Personalised journeys from initiating a web search to collecting customer feedback after an interaction create meaningful connections, which can lead to increased engagement and brand affinity.

How Can a Brand Create Personalised Experiences?

• Collecting and analysing customer interaction data.
• Collecting, and then acting on customer feedback.
• Using tools and systems that can help generate optimised trips.
• When brands implement personalisation tactics within their CX strategy, companies can offer recommendations and offers, optimise communication, and resolve issues in the most proactive way possible.

3) Omnichannel Approach

Customers have different preferred communication channels. One customer may prefer voice as their channel of choice, while another may reject the ability to speak to a live agent and prefer text messaging.

That’s why it’s important to use an omnichannel approach to your reach, making sure customers get your message on their preferred platform. The most effective way to do this is to provide omnichannel CX, which fosters an integrated experience across multiple channels and touch points. An omnichannel approach connects disparate channels and focuses on creating a unified and consistent journey for customers, regardless of the channels they choose to engage with a brand. They can effortlessly switch between channels while maintaining continuity and personalised engagement throughout their customer journey.

Build Customer Loyalty Through Proactive Outreach

By implementing proactive outreach, a company does more than meet customer expectations—it fosters a sense of trust and loyalty. By showing interest in their experience and taking steps to anticipate their needs, customers feel valued and appreciated. This, in turn, reinforces their brand loyalty.

La entrada 3 Steps To Implement Proactive Outreach In A Call Center se publicó primero en Enreach ES.

6 Tips To Improve the Performance and Productivity of Call Center Agents

1) Use the IVR to Segment Customers

One of the main factors affecting performance is poor or inaccurate distribution of incoming calls. With an IVR (Interactive Voice Response), information about the caller can be collected before they connect with an agent. The collected data is then provided to the agent in real time. An IVR menu means customers can get the solution they need faster, as well as agent’s can handle more complex queries.

2) Use the Power of Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Do you want to optimize your communications and increase the effectiveness of your call center by evaluating the customer’s intention and offering the expected response 24/7? The chatbots and voicebots of the Enreach Omnichannel Contact Center will answer all calls and will not leave any messages on seen. In addition, they will automatically solve the most frequent queries and allow your agents to focus on more important tasks.

Using Enreach’s AI engine, you can train your bot to understand customer needs and resolve their queries. If you connect our bots with external systems, you will be able to complete their responses with information from your customers. Also, you can configure the bot in more than 120 languages, collect information from each interaction, analyse why they contact you and improve responses.

3) Eliminate Unnecessary Calls

When you can eliminate any unnecessary calls, agents take this time back to take the call that matters. How to do it? Blocking any unwanted phone numbers, creating FAQs to help answer the most common questions, and using the IVR menu mentioned above.

4) Invest in On-Going Agent Training

If you want to retain the team and ensure that they continue to guarantee the success of the call center, continuous training is essential. Agents must receive the necessary training and, as changes are introduced in products or services, they must be provided with additional training. It’s also important to invest in “refresher courses” on topics like dealing with angry customers or managing common problems. This ensures that agents are continually developing and improving their skills.

On the other hand, implementing a call monitoring function will allow you to provide valuable feedback to each of the team members. This makes it easy for supervisors to listen in on calls and, when necessary, provide feedback in real time.

The Enreach Omnichannel Contact Center supervision module allows:

• Analyse service level and agent performance: Monitor OCC activity in real time and make better decisions based on service level or agent occupancy.
• Wallboards and reports so you don’t lose detail: Improve agent productivity by identifying their level of effectiveness through reports.
• Help your agents in real time: Advise them during their calls (whispering), monitor their conversations and distribute calls selectively based on their skills.

5) Share Best Practices and Monitor Calls

When using the appropriate software for the customer service department of a call center, it is possible to implement the call recording function. This is a useful tool, especially for newer agents. Additionally, breakout sessions can be created that let everyone hear both good and bad calls examples. By putting this into practice, you can reinforce the right actions and push other agents to improve their own efforts.

6) Implement the Best Technology To Empower your Agents

Even motivated agents can be less productive if they use complicated or outdated technology. For this reason, it is important to implement the latest technology available to guarantee agent productivity at all times. When it comes to ensuring that the contact center achieves the desired results, there are many factors to consider. Taking this information into account ensures that agents have the best support and tools to ensure a productive and successful contact center. If managers carry this out, it is more than likely that agents will reach higher levels of productivity.

La entrada 6 Tips To Improve the Performance and Productivity of Call Center Agents se publicó primero en Enreach ES.

The vast majority of employees (73%) want to go to the office when they know their colleagues are there, because they can collaborate, connect and build community. A structured hybrid work model supports flexibility and work-life balance, while allowing people to have certainty about when they and their colleagues can meet.

Organisations are moving toward structured hybrid work policies that allow for flexibility and precision in scheduling. According to the Gallup report, more than 2 in 3 business leaders demand that employees work from the office two to three days a week, while 43% of leaders surveyed indicated that their companies plan to increase Recovery Time Objective (RTO) mandates in 2024.

How To Create A Hybrid Work Policy

Step #1: Define a Hybrid Work Policy

There are multiple versions of structured hybrid work. First, you need to decide which version of hybrid work will work best for your team’s needs. A recent Gallup poll found that 6 in 10 hybrid employees want a stronger structure.

When defining hybrid work policies, employee expectations should be explored: What are reasonable parameters for remote work in your opinion? What constitutes a good balance between office time and working from home? How do you create a flexible work model that encourages office work and employee collaboration while giving teams the freedom to work remotely?

Once the position of the employees is defined, it is necessary to resort to the data. How is office space currently used for different job functions? What days do most of the employees come? Using these insights can help create a policy that feels more natural to computers.

There are a variety of ways to achieve a structured hybrid employment agreement. For example, a company might require people to be in the office 40% of the time during prime business hours, but this could be measured over a month or quarter instead of twice a week to see if the implementation of this work model is working or not.

Step #2: Empower the Team With the Right Resources

It is important to support employees with the technology they need to work effectively within the hybrid work model. In the office, workers need access to resources and bookable spaces, from rooms for team meetings to offices for individual work.

Without a desk or meeting room reservation solution, for example, hot desking or hoteling cannot be implemented within a structured hybrid work policy. Employees will be coming into the office and there will not be enough available desks and meeting spaces for everything. These types of situations could generate friction.

Therefore, whether it is hybrid or remote work, companies have to ensure that their teams have the resources they need to perform their tasks better. Flexible working requires technology that can help people regardless of their location.

Step #3: Drive Adoption of the Hybrid Work Policy

When implementing a hybrid work policy it pays to communicate proactively and clearly. How to drive the widespread adoption of this work model?

1) Documenting the hybrid work policy and underlying goals in a written document that is easily accessible to everyone.

2) Appointing and empowering department heads who, in addition to assisting in hybrid work policy development, can also facilitate organisational adoption.

3) Clearly defining the “why” of the policy, the benefits it entails, as well as the consequences of non-compliance.

Step #4: Measure and Improve Employee Performance

Last but not least, you have to define performance metrics or KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for your hybrid work policy. These metrics must be related to the underlying objectives that the policy seeks to promote in order to measure and improve the continuous performance of employees.

• Are the employees productive?
• How is your overall performance?
• Are the teams committed?
• How are your recruitment and retention rates?
• What is the impact of the policy on collaboration and corporate culture?

It is key to monitor pre-defined metrics on a regular basis, as well as collect and analyse qualitative and quantitative data to measure policy performance, including workplace analytics, employee feedback, office mood observations, and more.

When the metrics show poor performance, the corresponding adjustments must be made and measure how the changes are being made in order to correct the possible errors that are occurring.

With the Enreach Omnichannel Contact Center Supervision module you will be able to:

• Analyse the level of service and the performance of your agents: monitor the activity of your Omnichannel Contact Center in real time. Make better decisions based on the level of service or the occupation of the agents.
• Create wallboards and reports so as not to lose detail: improve the productivity of your agents by identifying their level of effectiveness through reports, wallboards and dashboards.
• Help your agents in real time: Advise them during their calls (whispering), monitor their conversations and distribute calls selectively based on their abilities (skills).

The Future of Work

In the medium and long term, hybrid work will become more structured. Employees want to know what is expected of them, and they also want to know when their colleagues will be in the office to collaborate and network. Organisations, for their part, want the office to be a hub for in-person teamwork, strengthening company culture and building community.

According to the Gallup report, hybrid work helps employees get the most out of their day and ensures they feel connected to their co-workers and the organisation. A structured hybrid approach, however defined, can offer the best characteristics of flexibility and human connection.

La entrada How To Create A Hybrid Work Policy se publicó primero en Enreach ES.