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3 Steps to Happier AgentsThrough Call Center Automation

When agents are happy, customers are too. Therefore, contact center leaders need to prioritize employee engagement and job satisfaction by reducing stress wherever possible. One way—probably the most powerful way—to improve the agent experience is through automation technology.

Customer service agents often take the brunt of consumers’ frustrations, which can take a toll on their morale. Even their supervisors know what a rough job it can be: 87% of contact center leaders acknowledge that their agents experience a moder-ate to high level of stress during their workday.

Is it just the nature of the job, or are there steps those leaders can take to improve the agent experience?

In this whitepaper, we’ll discuss:

> The Importance of Agent Happiness

> Potential Causes of Job Dissatisfaction

> 3 Ways Automation Improves the Agent Experience

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Many contact center leaders define success by metrics such as CSAT scores, first contact resolution rates, and talk time. While those numbers are an important factor when assessing a center and identifying weak spots, focusing on them as the key to improving customers’ happiness and brand loyalty leaves out a critical piece of the puzzle: your agents.

Agents play a significant role in how consumers view your brand, and you rely on them to create personal interactions that lead to engaged, happy customers. They can’t do that successfully, though, if they aren’t engaged and happy themselves. In

fact, companies that engage both their customers and their employ-ees experience a 240% boost in performance.

Happy employees are also less likely to leave, resulting in reduced hiring and training costs. And more experienced agents are bet-ter equipped to handle complex or unusual issues without needing to escalate to a supervisor.

The moment an employee connects emotionally with a customer is a source of untapped power that has profound implications for a company’s productivity and profitability.

When organizations know how to prepare front-line employees to make the most of these moments, they engage customers—who in turn spend more, visit more often, resist competitive overtures, promote their brand to others, and forgive the occasional service blunder.

-Gallup

The Importance of Agent Happiness>

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Working in a contact center can be challenging. Some days it might feel like every interaction is with an angry customer. Still, the job can be rewarding, especially for agents who have the tools and support they need to turn those angry customers into happy ones.

When your employees are feeling more frustrated than fulfilled, you need to deter-mine what’s standing in their way. Here are the three issues that most often affect job satisfaction:

1. Repetitive WorkVery few people anywhere love every aspect of their jobs, and customer service agents are no different. Most choose the career because they love helping people and solving problems, and they know that more mundane work, such as entering data and writing emails, comes with the territory. But when they have to spend more time on those repetitive tasks than on interacting with customers, their morale can drop.

2. Inefficient TechnologyIn a recent survey, 71% of contact center leaders recognized system and tool inefficiencies and difficulties as the top contributor to agents’ workday stress. As CallFinder’s Jeanne Landau explains, “Agents are on the front lines with customers every day; having them use outdated, useless technology is like sending today’s soldiers into battle with muskets and bayonets.”

Potential Causes of Job Dissatisfaction>

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3. Lack of InformationAbout one-third of consumers have received inaccurate or conflicting information from a customer service agent, and 64% don’t trust the information they’re given. As frustrating as that is for the consumer, imagine being the agent who doesn’t have easy access to the right answer.

The good news is that all three of those roadblocks—repetitive work, inefficient technology, and lack of information—can be easily addressed by implementing automation technology:

1. Reduce Repetitive Work by Automating Email InteractionsOn the surface, processing customer emails may not seem like a repetitive task, but it can be. The procedure is always the same: read an email, create a case, send a reply. And while each email is different, the responses are not.

Automation technology helps reduce the repetitive aspect of email interactions in two ways: First, it populates a case based on the details of the email. Then, it creates a response email for the agent to approve. Astute clients have found that when agents are given suggested reply content, their email efficiency increases by as much as 400%.

3 Ways Automation Improves the Agent Experience>

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2. Increase Efficiency with Intelligent Data EntryData entry is often repetitive work as well, along with being inefficient and prone to errors. Adding automation improves the process, and the agent experience.

Data entry shortcuts are a relatively simple way to streamline the task and reduce mistakes. For example, a leading national grocery chain has 150,000 product SKUs. Most contact center software would use a hierarchy of department, product type, etc., to drill down to the right SKU. But intelligent software provides “type down” functionality that dynamically searches as the agent types.

One of the biggest frustrations agents have with data entry is inflexible forms that require them to either skip irrelevant fields or, even worse, fill them in with unnecessary information. If a customer calls about a product issue, it’s important to record information like the SKU, lot number, and purchase date. But if they call because they slipped on a wet floor, agents shouldn’t have to skip past those product-related fields to get to the store number and location. It’s a waste of time, and frustrating for both the agent and the customer. Automation technology eliminates those concerns by dynamically changing the required fields based on product or reason codes.

3. Improve Access to Information Through In-Context GuidanceIn-context guidance is arguably the most powerful automation feature, particularly for new agents. In fact, it has been shown to reduce training time and lower supervisor escalations by 49%.

Agents are offered a next best action based on reason code, customer history, and other context, which helps them provide interactions that aren’t scripted, but instead personalized for each caller. They also have fingertip access to the information they need to provide accurate and consistent answers to customers’ questions, without having to memorize anything.

With these tools, agents are able to help customers more efficiently and with fewer frustrations, leading to higher job satisfaction, lower turnover, and improved CSAT scores and retention rates.

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Astute’s ePowerCenter™ CRM solution improves the agent experience through smart automation technology, including:

Automated FulfillmentSend personalized responses based on contextual information about the con-sumer and the case.

Dynamic Field ConfigurationGather only the information pertinent to the type of interaction or issue, improving data quality and reducing call handling time.

In-Context GuidanceGuide your agents through conversations with consumer history and context-driv-en recommended actions.

Visit our website to learn how Astute helps contact center leaders create an agent experience that improves job satisfaction and engagement.

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About Astute SolutionsConsumers want to talk to their favorite brands like they talk to their friends, instead of being forced to communicate through strictly structured interfaces.

Our blend of leading edge technologies makes this possible, eliminating friction during every customer interaction.

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