Power to the People: Training Super Agents

When problems in the contact centre require dedication, flexibility, and innovation, your customers need more than what the average agent can provide.

Contact centre agents need to adapt to the changing expectations of the customer service world.

As customers become empowered with online resources and self-help troubleshooting, the realm of customer service moves away from generalized problem solving. Call centre agents need to be prepared to handle increasingly complex challenges that customers can’t solve on their own.

To meet these needs, a shift will be necessary—a shift from regular agents to employees with experience, autonomy, and exceptional critical thinking skills.

Contact centre super agents.

Getting the Basics Down

The process of building a super agent is something that needs to be nurtured from the very beginning of the training process.

Data gathered by Zendesk shows that customer service is the most important factor in how much a customer trusts a brand. Start your agents off on the right foot here by ensuring that they’re involved and engaged with their training. When you develop your agents, stress the value of their service at your contact centre—they provide the ability to build customer relationships and contribute to the success of the company.

But how do you get new recruits (who may have never handled a customer in their lives) excited about customer service?

To start with, involve them in the training process. This can be done in several ways:

• Help them set their own goals: when agents have ownership of individual benchmarks, their engagement and commitment to goal-achievement is greatly increased.
• Include them during brainstorming: giving your agents a sense that they’re helpful, involved, and important to the improvement of the contact centre can do wonders for their motivation (and may lead to some interesting insights as well).
• Support success: when your trainees do something right, don’t keep it a secret—spread their success around to boost morale and give your other agents examples of what to shoot for.

These basics are essential, as the 2014 IBM Digital Customer Experience Report showed that two-thirds of customers who experienced poor customer service left a brand’s website or visited a competitor. To prevent this from becoming a part of your centre, keep your trainees involved, keep them engaged, and encourage their success any way you can.

So, how do you elevate your agents to the point where they consider best practices commonplace, and aim for something higher?

Let’s take a look.

Building the Skills

A contact centre super agent needs to have the versatility and creativity to solve any type of situation that may arise. Sure, there are some problems that will always need to be sent up the chain of command, but an empowered and effective team can make sure that these are the exceptions rather than the rule.

Once your agents are trained in basic contact centre support, you can begin applying the practices necessary to turn them into customer service experts:

• Team them up: when you find that certain agents are consistently performing better than others, pair your highest performers with the ones that need work. Having a mentor that can coach them in their secrets of success can help spread around the skills that make exceptional agents.
• Provide empowerment: super agents need to be flexible to solve their customer’s problems. As managers, do your best to give your agents the freedom to solve customer issues without constantly having to “run it by the boss first.”
• Use feedback: what better source of knowledge could there be than the very customers you deal with? Let your agents listen to their own calls to hear where they may have gone wrong. You can even solicit feedback directly from willing callers to give your agents specific information on how to improve their performance.
• Multitasking training: a super agent should be able to handle more than one customer at a time, and the rise of the multichannel contact centre provides more opportunities for this than ever before. Give your employees practice handling multiple customers where applicable, including over chat, social media, or email. While this step can take time to master, an agent capable of delivering service to multiple customers at once can provide big benefits to hold times and calling queues.

From Ordinary to Extraordinary

While a polite phone manner may have been enough for customer service in the past, a wider variety of skills are needed by today’s agents. These involve strong communication, creativity, and the ability to solve problems independently. These skills won’t just come on their own, though—they can only be gained with the proper experience and training that comes from a well-managed and supportive contact centre company.

Want to learn more ways to turn your run of the mill agents into contact centre superstars? Check out our free white paper!