Customer service agents are often the primary point of contact with your customers. It makes sense that you want your customer-facing employees to be helpful, enthusiastic, and happy to be doing their jobs. After all, your company’s reputation, satisfaction ratings, and profitability are at stake.
So how do you create a contact center environment that motivates agents?
Through a recent survey of contact center decision makers, Bright Pattern identified the top three strategies for creating engaged agents.
Of our survey respondents,
At Bright Pattern, we believe in the agent empowerment model, which means providing agents with the tools and technology they need to succeed. This model aligns with our survey results, and it’s been driving our roadmap since the beginning.
Here’s what the agent empowerment model looks like in practice:
Here’s a breakdown of the benefits you can expect when your contact center operations revolve around the agent empowerment model.
Higher Customer Ratings and Sales
According to Gallup, highly engaged teams achieve, on average, a 10% increase in customer ratings and a 20% increase in sales.
Faster, More Efficient Problem Resolution
Agents who feel more valued by their employers are more motivated to resolve calls satisfactorily, find creative solutions, and improve their own knowledge and customer relationship skills.
They have access to a knowledge base and can, at any time, reach out to subject matter experts to resolve customer problems faster and more accurately.
Less Employee Turnover
The costs of replacing and retraining agents can be a tremendous drawdown on operational budgets, and the loss of institutional knowledge when an experienced agent walks out the door also impacts customer service center performance.
Using AI to automate frequent requests and routine tasks makes the agents’ work less transactional. This increases agent satisfaction because agents can focus on helping people.
Higher Customer Experience
Empowered agents also have the right tools to provide a consistent customer experience and resolve issues fast, on any channel, any time. They depend on a single, integrated application combining unified communication tools, access to information, knowledge bases, and customer data in context of the moment, all of which ultimately improve customer satisfaction.
By making some smart investments, you can vastly improve agents’ attitude, abilities, job commitment, and engagement levels—all of which have proven positive impacts on how they serve your customers.
The time is now. Learn more by downloading our e-book.