Article: Essential strategies to empower your agents | As featured in Comms Business

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Read our insights article, as featured in Comms Business: ‘Essential strategies to empower your agents’

Kakapo Systems explains why agent empowerment is critical to the success of call and contact centers.

Winning agent empowerment strategies ensure agents they are given the tools and direction, to remain at the top of their game. These essential solutions are a combination of best-in-class technologies and a mindset that places agents at the core of success.  Agents are the cornerstone of your customer service experience. As such they have a critical role in shaping overall perception and sales success.

One study shows that 68 per cent of customers still prefer to communicate with a business over the phone. This places agents at the frontline of delivering an exceptional customer experience.

Provide a simple interface

A sure-fire way to provide a negative experience for agents, is to give them an interface which slows them down. Whilst a contact center interface can be crammed with a million different features and functionalities, their relevance to agents may be minimal. A bloated UI can prevent agents from optimised interface navigation and negatively impact their ability to respond to conversations.

As such, choosing a contact center interface that provides agents with the best navigation experience requires balancing their needs and requirements, whilst ensuring a simple, elegant design. It can be a delicate tight rope to walk, with agents still performing at their best with these core features;

  • Easily visualise all queues and wait times
  • Simple call handling tools
  • Dynamic ACD control

Implement a unified platform

If an agent is experiencing a disjointed, cumbersome experience, then in turn so will customers. This is highlighted by a survey suggesting that 62 per cent of contact center leaders are looking for integrated solutions.’ Unifying your platform is a critical way of integrating a variety of features an agent may use into one seamless interface. Doing so provides agents an environment where they are not hindered by processes, but rather, have a seamless unified solution.

Examples of ways a unified platform enhance agents experiences include:

System hoppingContact center solutions can limit the time agents spend system hopping by unifying as many systems as possible. Whether through consolidating channels, creating easy to navigate contact fields that span departments, or integration with CRMs and other external software agents may use.

Work from anywhereIntuitive applications can turn an office from a physical workspace to a digital one. The ability to work from any location is powerful for call centers with variable demand that can tap short shifts for home worker agents.

Agent gamification: Encouraging agents to overperform and providing leader boards of productivity can help them to compete and provide an overall bump to customer service.

Keep your agents memory sharp

If agents are expected to communicate with customers daily, then a primary focus should be on keeping their memories sharp. A fundamental feature for any text-based communication channels, conversation histories and transcripts allow for agents to have access to past exchanges with customers. This allows for agents to refresh both themselves and customers on prior discussions if necessary.

Having quick access to previous conversations further elevates the customer experience an agent can provide, eliminating the frustration and time an agent may take repeating parts of a discussion or checking through notes by enabling them to have a complete understanding of past interactions with a customer either dynamically throughout the conversation or prior.

For tools to empower Agents and more: visit Kakapo’s Call and Contact Centre solutions

Original article ‘An end to abandoned calls’ featured on Comms Business November 2022

 

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