Level Up: Improve Customer Experience With Agent Engagement

Agents are the heart of your contact centre, and in order to create the most positive customer experience that you can, they must be ready, willing and able to deliver their maximum efforts.

Motivating agents to go beyond their job description requires providing the proper tools, providing incentives for high performance and involving agents in the company in a more integral way. Here are five handy tips for maximizing agent engagement in the contact centre for a better customer experience.

1. Increase Agent Autonomy

Micromanaging agents can cause them to feel discouraged about the limits of their position and distract from the end goal: delivering a positive customer experience. When agents have greater autonomy, they often feel more directly involved with individual customers and develop a heightened sense of responsibility for the customer experience. This autonomy and flexibility makes agents more effective at meeting customers’ needs. Your agents are your employees for a reason: you hired them! So trust in their professionalism, competence and ability to deliver customer service, giving them the extra room they need to truly shine.

2. Encourage Awareness of End-Customer Impacts

Agents must be encouraged to view customers as unique individuals as much as possible, because this enhances the quality of their customer service as they develop an awareness of the positive impacts they can have on clients. In a recent study conducted by management professor Dr. Adam Grant, a group of agents met a scholarship recipient who briefly explained the positive impacts that their work had had on his life. A month later, the agents who met the scholarship recipient had increased their weekly phone time by 142% and their funds by 171%. If connecting your agents directly to end-customers is not possible, try showcasing customer photos and encouraging agents to share positive experiences with customers to generate motivation in the workplace.

3. Incentivize

Incentives and rewards motivate agents to perform at their best, increase a sense of personal pride in their accomplishments and foster personal growth. Consider individual or team-based rewards in the form of monetary compensation. Rewards can be organized competitively to maximize motivation, or non-competitively, meaning that every agent who meets a certain standard will be rewarded. According to research from Bersin & Associates, thanking your employees for their hard work and efforts through a rewards program can result in a 30% lower turnover rate. In an era when employees are increasingly likely to jump to new jobs after only a couple of years, building a stronghold of reliable, high-performing agents is more important than ever for improving the customer experience.

4. Integrate Agents into the Corporate Level

If contact centre agents are integrated into the decision-making process alongside their corporate superiors, they develop an increased sense of involvement in the company and personal responsibility for their work. This can enhance productivity and motivation, as agents feel increasingly valued by the company by contributing respected opinions and feedback. This also cultivates a more positive work environment in which each employee is made to feel like a valued member of the team.

5. Display Real-Time Metrics

Real-time information, such as current number of callers in the queue, longest waiting time, current average abandonment time and the status of other agents allows employees to make informed decisions based on the information provided. This increases agent effectiveness at addressing individual customer needs and incentivizes agents to perform well. When agents can see their performance on display alongside the performance of colleagues, they will develop a sense of motivation to deliver a higher quality performance and an increased awareness of possible performance issues when an individual isn’t measuring up to the rest. This can also be integrated into a rewards program where top performing agents are rewarded based on average weekly or monthly metrics.

The End Result

Engaging your agents in the contact centre decreases turnover rates while maximizing motivation, awareness of positive impacts and a sense of personal responsibility and pride. All of these factors work together to ensure that your agents are capable and motivated to deliver the best customer experience they can. For more information on how to improve the customer experience through agent engagement, download our free white paper.