Call Center Management Featured Article
Expanding and Improving the Customer Experience via Agent Growth and Empowerment
As a call center manager, you try to do everything right. You’ve got a good schedule, and you’ve properly trained your agents. They understand how to use the technologies you provide them, and you’ve made improvements in the accessibility of information. But you’re still not amazing customers: in fact, customer reports indicate you’re barely satisfying them. At this point, it’s easy to throw up your hands and say, “Customers are impossible to please.” But we know that’s not true, since a select few companies manage to do it very well. So what are you missing?
For starters, you may want to look at some of the improvements you’ve made recently and ask yourself, do these actions really improve the customer’s experience, or just the company’s bottom line? Certain metrics that seem to measure quality are sometimes actually working against customers, according to Monet Software (News - Alert) CEO Chuck Ciarlo in a recent blog post.
“Average handle time is down? Great! But how did it get that way? Sometimes key performance metrics do not tell the whole story,” he wrote. “Use this data as a launching point for an outcome-based strategy that places more emphasis on customer loyalty, customer satisfaction and new business sales.”
Measuring outcome-based metrics can help you see what the picture is like for the customer. Sometimes improvements are at the expense of the customer experience: they’re merely designed for short-term financial gains to the organization. It may be not only metrics, but workers, too. Sure, inexperienced agents may be cheap, but are they capable of providing customers with a great experience?
Contact center agents who are welded to a script can sound like robots, and no customers want to be served by robots. Agents without any flexibility to go off-script are never going to be able to use their initiative to delight customers.
“Allow your agents to make decisions for customers – this not only requires a level of trust in agent judgment, it also necessitates a workforce management solution that provides agents with the data they need in real time to make an informed decision,” wrote Ciarlo.
Customer loyalty in the long run comes from making a real connection with the humans of your company – usually the contact center. Ensure your agents are permitted to be human by allowing them to use their brains to serve the customers’ needs to the best of their ability. And in addition to baseline metrics, measure your agents against more personal goals you’ve set for them that relate to career development and growth.
“Most contact centers establish achievement targets – lower average handle time, better first call resolution, etc.,” wrote Ciarlo. “As these are implemented, agents and other team members should also be challenged to set personal goals, such as a renewed commitment to courtesy.”
There is ample evidence that if you nurture and encourage your workforce to grow and branch out, so too will your customers’ positive experiences. With properly trained, experienced agents who have a “feel” for customer needs, companies are better placed to maximize the value of every call. Cutting corners may create short-lived financial gains for the company, but in the long run, it’s building new foundations that will enable real growth.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi