Workforce Management Featured Article
How to Succeed as a Contact Center Agent
The keys to be a successful contact center agent can be applied to just about any other profession – or just to a happy life in general. But, as Oprah Winfrey and the $10-billion-a-year self-help publishing industry demonstrate, we can all use an occasional reminder of what to do to improve ourselves.
So here’s a quick rundown of some tips on how contact center agents can best serve their customers, their employers, and – ultimately – themselves.
It all starts with being nice, of course. Perhaps the most important aspect of customer service is courtesy. So when speaking with customers, be sure to mind your manners.
Be friendly. Remain upbeat. And be sure not to interrupt callers. Instead, be patient, listen to what they have to say, let them know you understand and want to help, and then go to work finding a solution.
All this will convey your own confidence and should go a long way in instilling confidence in others and putting them at ease.
While it can be helpful in certain situations to fake it ‘til you make it, knowing how to do a job is obviously even better.
So when contact center agents are unsure of what to do, they should be assertive in taking steps to find solutions to the immediate issues. And they should make sure they’re ready to address other requests in the future.
To do that, agents can ask for input from a contact center a manager. They can employ other resources – such as the experience of fellow contact center representatives or other materials. And, following challenging calls, they can seek to know what they don’t know – and ask their managers for training or materials that might be helpful.
Speaking of training, in today’s world, things change fast. So it’s important for agents – and, for that matter, workers of all types – to be adaptable and willing to learn new things.
“Knowledge is a commodity, to be the smartest person in the room all you need is a smartphone. What is far more valuable than knowledge is the ability to learn new things and apply those learnings to new scenarios and environments,” notes Jane Hart, the founder of the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies (News - Alert). “This is what the employee of the future needs to focus on, ‘learning to learn.’”
Edited by Maurice Nagle