Zero to Hero: Turning Agents into Customer Service Masters

While the importance of good customer service has been well established, it’s a tough mountain to climb without properly trained agents to provide it.

What makes a great call centre agent? Is it the ability to stay calm under the pressure of a voice snapping in your ear with a dozen ringing phones around you? Or is it the persistence and dedication required to handle problem after problem in a field where agents are under-appreciated and battered relentlessly? According to a 2014 Customer Service report by Parature, 65 percent of consumers admitted that they’ve cut ties with a brand over a single poor customer service experience.  With numbers like that, knowing what makes a good customer service agent is as important as ever.

The answer may lie in several factors that are rare to find in a single individual. Agents who excel at customer service support are knowledgeable, confident, creative, and have a high amount of patience when dealing with frustrated callers. While all of these traits together are rare to find in a single individual, proper coaching can elevate the common employee from a wobbly-voiced phone rep to a master of the customer experience.

This type of agent management can be accomplished with a variety of techniques, including:

• Call Monitoring and Management:

  While recording customer complaint calls is nothing new in the customer service game, most contact centres use it as a precautionary measure against disgruntled callers rather than the educational tool that it is. By keeping audio records of your agents in action, it becomes an easy process to identify their weak points and find areas that can be improved with a little guidance.

• Agent Scoring:

  Provide quantifiable measures of agent performance that can be measured against industry standards. The success of customer service practices can be difficult to measure, but reviewing interactions that occur via phone, email and web chat can help provide a comprehensive view of the qualities of an agent and what their strengths and weaknesses are.

• Customized Training:

  Above all, no two agents will respond the same to the same type of reinforcement. By using quantifiable metrics, audio records and past evaluations, management can customize their training protocols to the exact needs of each agent. This step is essential in fostering the growth of your agents and creating an environment of collaboration towards a common goal.

Knowing what areas to train your agents in is well and good, but how do you raise them to the level necessary for an exceptional customer experience? Broad educational materials don’t often make an impact on trainees, and frequent meetings can eat up valuable time that could otherwise be spent productively.

The Value of Real-Time Coaching

Good coaching isn’t all about simple instruction; it requires creativity, goal-setting and knowledge on the part of the instructor in order to identify the weakness of their protégé and how to best manage them. Call centre coaching follows the same trend. Effective coaching comes from personalized feedback presented in intervals that are efficient and useable for the trainee. Without providing feedback in real-time, agents are bound to repeat the same mistakes over and over in an endless loop that leaves their heads spinning and your customers frustrated.

Proper coaching with methods that can be delivered on the fly will empower your agents and give them the confidence and knowledge they need to effectively handle customer complaints.

Keeping Agents Informed

Having agents that are well versed in their subject matter is the cornerstone of good customer service. Knowledge management is becoming a priority for more contact centres, and rightfully so.  A large part of the customer service game is the ability to find information, yet knowledge management extends beyond data retrieval.

The context of a problem and previous solutions that have been attempted are areas that your customers will expect you to be aware of, and failing to provide solutions may cost you. A 2013 report by econsultancy indicates that only 58 percent of businesses are beginning to implement integrated customer service experiences, which means that smart organizations have an opening to set themselves apart in the service game.

Exceptional customer service agents are more than just manuals of knowledge that can follow scripts. Effective agents will be able to analyze situations, infer knowledge from context and get creative with their problem solving. It doesn’t hurt to be open to constructive criticism as well – the ability to adapt and learn from past experiences can make the difference between agents who are adequate and agents who blow your customers away.

Interested in learning more about how you can push your call centre agents to excellence? Download our free white paper!