Contact centers are in crisis. Many new agents quickly become frustrated because they feel out of their depth and don’t know how to help customers. More tenured agents often feel the pressure to pick up the slack and are currently leaving their roles in record numbers. For these reasons, it’s hard to recruit and keep contact center agents these days.
Maintaining optimum levels of agent numbers and experience is incredibly hard for businesses, and if organizations are going to turn this around, they must focus on simplifying the role of an agent to help overcome the attrition, tension, emotion, and stress of the job.
Why is an agent’s role so complex?
An agent’s role is complex, and their interactions with customers can be stressful and emotional. They spend all day answering questions and searching for solutions to address a wide variety of customer problems. If agents don’t have sufficient skills, experience, and technology to serve their customers, it will impact their work performance and make customers unhappy.
The primary complexities and challenges facing agents include:
- Excessive call volumes
- Limited number of agents to support workload
- Customer complaints and difficult interactions
- Limited knowledge to answer customer questions
- Language barriers
- Outdated computer systems and software
- Technical glitches
Outdated computer systems can limit an agent’s ability to find answers and assist customers quickly. It is not the fault of the agent because they are only using the computer hardware and software that they have been given. But it still impacts the agent’s stress levels, making them less productive if they cannot use these tools on the job effectively.
Companies need to invest in new computer technology and software systems to enable their agents to do their jobs better and more efficiently. Then, agents will feel less pressure when assisting customers with their problems because they will have access to the best tools, solutions, and resources to stay productive and not waste time.
How will making their job simpler help?
Successful agents are able to answer customers’ questions and find solutions to their problems quickly. However, there must be a simple process for the agent to find these answers and solutions if they don’t know them already. That way, they don’t have to spend too much time and effort assisting each customer.
Reducing agent effort can have the following benefits:
- Saves time
- Increases productivity
- Reduces organizational expenses
- Reduces turnover
- Improves agent morale
- Builds strong customer relationships and trust
- Increases sales
Training agents will become faster and easier if their day-to-day role is less complicated. For example, agents with fewer processes and systems to learn are more likely to remember the most important things and make fewer mistakes. Plus, agents will have extra downtime between calls if they solve customers’ problems faster than usual. They can use this downtime to focus on their personal development, coaching, or career path activities to better themselves.
How do you actually make it simpler?
Conversation intelligence and real-time guidance software can simplify an agent’s job. It can connect agents to all the systems, tools, and data sources they need to assist customers and improve the quality of their support. For example, they can use the software to access social media feeds and conversational records to understand the average customer’s problem so that they can have solutions ready the next time they call.
One of the most helpful things the software can do is instantly summarize the conversations between agents and customers. Instead of reviewing the entire transcripts and audio recordings of conversations, agents and company managers can use the software to review the most critical points of the conversations quickly.
Gaining insight into common customer problems and complaints can help agents and company managers develop better customer support solutions in the future. It is the best way for companies to retain their customers’ loyalty and encourage them to purchase their products and services.
Here’s our rundown of how conversation intelligence and real-time guidance software can make things simpler for agents:
- AI-driven data insights are delivered to agents to help them make the right decisions with customers quickly
- Accelerate agent training by using an all-in-one system to reduce training time
- Automatically ensure agent compliance on up to 70% of calls with customers
- Agents can enter simple keywords and phrases to find relevant information and customer solutions
- All calls with customers are automatically transcribed with up to 97% accuracy
- Simplifies workflows by automatically delivering critical information from across multiple systems to agents
- Agents can enjoy real-time guidance and assistance to come to viable solutions quickly
- AI-powered agent assistant guides agents on how to improve their customer interactions
- Automates repetitive tasks to streamline complex customer interactions
- Agents can ask questions to AI about their customer interactions and receive immediate human-like responses
When agents have an AI-powered assistant to answer questions and complete repetitive tasks, it saves them tremendous time and energy. Agents can direct their saved time and energy toward assisting more customers, improving productivity and building better customer relationships.
Reduce agent effort in your call center today
Deploying the right automated tools will reduce an agent’s effort level but still improve their performance. The technology is a powerful, intelligent, AI-powered solution with outstanding capabilities, while still being incredibly easy for agents to use. Using these tools can ensure that agents deliver a positive outcome for customers during every conversation.
Are you ready to guide your agents to quick solutions during live customer interactions? The right call center software can direct agents to the most viable solutions for customer problems and concerns in real time. It reduces handling time, increases efficiency, eases stress & tension, and makes customers happy enough to want to buy something.
