Part 3: How to create the Agent Experience your customer experience needs

So far we’ve looked at why Agent Experience (AX) is key to delivering impressive, connected customer experiences. And we’ve explored the challenges that create poor AX. But how do you actually go about enhancing Agent Experience in your own contact centre? Read on to find out…

No matter which way you look at it, better Agent Experience (AX) can change everything. 

Because happy agents are good for business.

Research by McKinsey found that engaged and satisfied agents are 16x more likely to refer friends to their company. They’re also 8.5x more likely to stay than leave within a year, and over 3x more likely to feel extremely empowered to resolve customer issues.

If you’ve read the first blog in this series, it should be pretty clear why great AX is key to creating a stand-out, sustainable contact centre customer experience.

So now you’re probably wondering about the reality of doing this.

How do you go about bettering AX? Where do you start? What needs to change?

Well, you’ve come to the right place to find out.

Read on for a quick overview of how to build better AX in your contact centre.

Three steps to creating five-star Agent Experience for your contact centre

Creating an AX that boosts CX comes down to empowering agents with the best processes, technology, and working environment so they feel valued, connected and motivated. (In other words: giving them everything they need to deliver exceptional customer service.)

1. Automate where it makes sense – and let your agents shine where they’re really needed

Offering customers the right blend of self-service and live, assisted service is crucial to delivering effective customer experiences. But it’s equally as important for ensuring your agents remain happy and productive.

By providing automated and self-service options (like a chatbot or online knowledge base) for simple and routine customer requests, you can save agents’ time and reduce the number of mundane, repetitive tasks in their queues.

Likewise, smooth handoffs between chatbots and agents mean people can step in at any time to resolve complex customer requests – requests that require specialist knowledge and experience. And that’s where real job satisfaction lies. (Who doesn’t love solving a tricky task and making a customer’s day?)

Achieving the right tech-to-human ratio can be more than a little challenging, but AI can help out.

Specially designed algorithms can automatically categorise the types of requests coming in from customers. They can send simple tasks to self-service or automated channels, and pass complex queries to agents.

2. Go beyond an omnichannel customer experience with orchestration

Customers now expect omnichannel customer service as a bare minimum. But there’s a big difference between providing channel options and delivering a great CX across them.

When organisations have multiple systems for managing multi-channel customer communications, they end up with siloed channels of communication. And it’s super easy for customer information to get stuck (and often lost) in these silos.

So, customers moving between different channels have to repeat information they’ve already provided, sometimes over and over again.

(And nobody enjoys doing that.)

Even worse: when systems don’t talk to each other, agents can’t draw on valuable cross-channel insights to enrich and elevate the customer service they’re providing.

(At least not without doing some fiddly searching – and holding the customer up in the process.)

So, you need to go beyond omnichannel.

When you orchestrate channels, customers and agents can move freely between them without leaving any important contextual information or insights behind.

To pull this off, you’ll need a platform that connects channels and gives agents access to every past and present customer interaction – regardless of which channel that interaction happened on.

Most importantly, you’ll need a platform that condenses all that valuable information into a unified, one-window interface. Which means agents don’t have to toggle between screens and systems while the customer taps their toes.

With a platform like Puzzel, orgaisations can empower agents to deliver CX that isn’t just omnichannel-enabled, but omnichannel-optimised. They’ll handle customer enquiries quickly and effectively, with far less stress and far more insight.

And customers will feel the benefit of faster issue resolution and less friction at all stages of their journey.

3. Activate a stress-free service for home-based and remote agents

The COVID-19 pandemic has increased the number of contact centre agents working remotely and at home. And as companies begin to see major cost savings, this way of working will inevitably become the new normal.

To give agents the flexibility they need to make this work, many contact centre operators are deploying cloud-based systems that support omnichannel service journeys from any location and any connected device.

Puzzel’s cloud-based platform is designed to take the stress out of every aspect of contact centre work, wherever agents are. It’s intuitive and easy to use, and agents can customise their interface to suit the way they work. (Everyone is different, so their technology should be too!)

It also integrates with collaboration tools like TeamsLink, ensuring help and advice from their colleagues is only ever a click away.

The Puzzel platform also reduces anxiety for managers, providing them with a live and comprehensive overview of operations and performance. This enables them to monitor traffic and ensure their team is never under-staffed or overstretched.

By making things easy for agents (and managers), you'll help reduce their stress levels.

And you’ll also free them from the technical troubleshooting that accompanies less user-friendly cloud-based systems. Which means people can focus on their core customer-service tasks, and be their most engaged, empathetic, creative and human selves.

In other words: they can be exactly the sort of agent that customers want to talk to.

Great CX starts with great AX.

(And great AX starts with… well, us!)

Next up, we’re looking at the exciting future (and new business value) that great AX creates.