What is agent experience?
A paradigm shift is happening in the world of CX. While businesses used to have their focus solely on the customer experience, and that’s a topic that we talked about before, in recent years they’re starting to take into account the agent experience. You may ask yourself: “Why should I care so much about it?” The three main reasons any business should care are:
- You should care for your employees' happiness in general.
- A happy employee stays with the company, reducing attrition.
- A happy and satisfied agent creates great CX
- A happy and satisfied customer is a returning customer
It really is that simple. Let’s have a more detailed look.
What is agent experience?
To give it a definition, agent experience is the sum and totality of everything that is connected to an agent doing their job.
We can divide agent experience into two parts:
- The agent as an employee
- The agent as a person
The first part is concerned with the agent’s needs as an employee. These are concerned with how easily the agent can do their job.
The second part is concerned with the agent’s needs as a person. Unfortunately, some companies don’t focus on these because there isn’t a directly obvious correlation between these and agent performance
Why is it important?
Starting with the first part, which we can also call agent effortless experience, it’s easy to see how crucial it is. Is your employee missing a piece of equipment? They physically can’t do their job.
Is your system slow to load? This leads to frustration and poor CSAT, because the agent is trying to do their job as quickly and efficiently as possible, especially because they have a customer on the line waiting for their problem to be solved. This leads to the agent skipping parts of the process which may seem less important, giving false information to the customer because they can’t wait for the real information to load, or if they have a handle on their emotions in this situation, the customer may not. This leads to the agent having to listen to angry rants directed at them and getting frustrated and annoyed.
The frustration the agent has doesn’t have to be due to technical difficulties but also to just a badly optimized process or badly implemented tools. If you have two tools that don’t really effectively communicate with each other, and the agent has to constantly jump from one and to the other, this leads to slow service, creates room for error and just wastes your agent’s time and effort in vain.
The second part is focused on the employee as a human. Here we’re obviously talking about catering to their basic needs as humans, such as fresh air, access to bathrooms, regular breaks, etc. but we’re also talking about creating an environment in which they can feel safe, and thrive. The modern workplace shouldn’t just be concerned with the physical needs of employees, but also the emotional ones.
What can you do to improve your agent experience?
From our perspective as CX and AX experts there are numerous ways a business can improve their agent experience. These are some of the solutions we offer that can make your agent experience an agent dream.
Integrated platforms.
One of the things Transcom offers is the setting up of integrated platforms so that you connect all your agent-facing systems so that they work in a single environment, not having to switch from one to another in an intuitive and seamless way. Focusing on creating an intuitive environment for your agents to work in is paramount because you don’t want frustration to mount with every click, especially if they’re doing thousands of them per day.
Having everything within a single window makes the agent’s job easier and increases their work satisfaction. This, in turn, allows them to focus on the conversation with the customer and makes the interaction go much quicker and smoother, especially if the agent doesn’t have to keep apologizing to the customer and saying “Just a moment, I’m waiting for it to load”.
Omnichannel automation.
By using an integrated omnichannel approach you can improve both CX and AX in one fell swoop. Like we touched upon in our previous article, this is a great way to reduce the number of clicks the agent needs to help a customer. From the customer’s perspective you show commitment on meeting them wherever they are, bettering the CX and making it very easy for them to contact you and even switch from channel to channel without breaking the conversation. Not only that but with a well implemented omnichannel approach your agent will be able to, at a glance, see the history of issues and interactions the customer had.
By having all the necessary information as soon as the customer calls, the agent is quick, efficient and doesn’t have to waste precious time trying to dig out necessary information amongst tabs and tabs of data which are slow to load. This speed and efficiency makes the agent happy because of the ease of use, and it makes the customer happy because they don't have to repeat all the information once more.
Automation.
You might have noticed the trend already, when talking about agent experience we will often focus on agent effortless experience and how to make their journey in each interaction as easy as possible. One of the things we can implement to do that is automation. With automation your agents will spend less time performing admin tasks and more time focusing on what actually matters for their job.
Automation also helps with training. If your agents don’t have to learn the ins and outs of multiple systems they can be trained in a fraction of the time, or they can spend more time learning skills that will help them during the interactions themselves.
Implementing chatbots.
Implementing a good FAQ and chatbots can make your agent experience a dream. They serve as a sort of sieve, filtering out queries that are too simple and mundane for your agents to concern themselves with. That makes them more available to do actual complex work. Removing the frustration of constantly answering the same questions and solving 30 second problems all day is a great morale boost for employees. Everybody likes feeling useful and like they’re doing something important.
Gamification.
The easiest and best way we as humans learn is through game and play. Gamification is a process in which we take the mundane and make it fun and accessible by implementing game mechanics. This process raises agent satisfaction with things that would otherwise prove as a detriment to that score. The main goal is to create interactivity to raise engagement, and to promote collaboration.
Employee engagement and performance
By using solutions like our custom performance management tool you can increase and improve communication to your employees about their performance. People require encouragement and feedback about their work in order to thrive. While constructive criticism is something everyone should accept, positive reinforcement is the thing that helps your employees thrive by focusing on what they do best, and what they excel at.
Automated Translation
Our newest solution to improving agent experience is Automated Translation. With this AI-powered tool agents can communicate with anyone, anywhere, without the need to know the language.
This helps agents take their mind off of translation and allows them to communicate with the customer in the same way they would with someone speaking their language. Communicating in such a natural way means that the agent focuses on what’s important to them and for helping the customer instead of thinking if they understood the customer or vice versa.
Automated Translation also eliminates the parts of the day where the agent is bored waiting for the next call or chat. Allowing your agents to speak any language means that they can be more productive by helping other centers around the world. For the agent on the other end of that bargain that means taking the stress off of their back during peak surges. The peaks and valleys of activity are flattened creating a smoother and easier experience for the agent. Both of these things create a happier and more active agent.