Keeping agents engaged in a remote working environment poses a challenge for many businesses. Remote working can easily affect agent productivity and impact the end-customer. With an effective gamification strategy and the right workforce optimisation tools, companies can keep agents connected and empowered ultimately leading to higher levels of motivation and improved customer interactions.
In this edition of the CX Today round table, we welcome:
- Jonathan Allan, Chief Marketing Officer, Puzzel
- David Noone, Strategic Innovation Lead and Key Account Director, Odigo
- Brian Spraetz, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Five9
- Chris Bauserman, VP, NICE CXOne
- Dave Singer, VP Go-To-Market Strategy, Verint
Our panellists will discuss how live agents can keep motivation up while working remotely, what analytics measure agents' productivity and the benefits of forecasting high call volumes with workforce optimisation tools.
How can businesses keep live agents motivated while working remotely?
Allan: "From gamification to wallboards — there are lots of ways to keep agents engaged and motivated on the job. But for more permanent results, businesses need to take a more holistic approach.
Offering more flexible working hours, providing clearer pathways for career progression and empowering teams with reliable and intuitive tools that make it easier for them to do their jobs successfully, are key to achieving long-term agent engagement and productivity.
At Puzzel, we call it Agent Experience, and have seen firsthand the impact it can have on customer satisfaction, agent retention and revenue. The more empowered your agents feel, the more motivated they’ll be to deliver exceptional experiences for your customers, and the more loyalty they’ll earn for your business."
Noone: "Agents need to feel connected to their wider teams. There is a highly sociable element to many contact centres that is easily lost when teams are working remotely, so regular and transparent communication is crucial here. Moreover, ensuring teams understand the importance of their roles and identifying the impact they have on the brand and customer experience (CX) is critical. So don’t skip those 1-2-1 meetings and stay alert for signs of burn-out or exhaustion.
Organisations also need to continue to invest in remote working technologies, as this will give their team the best tools for the job, provide adequate training and recognition when they’re successful and lead to a greater understanding of their ambitions, meaning agents can build a better career for themselves.
Gamification, workforce management, flexible scheduling and the often-maligned self-service can really help here. Well-designed and intelligently deployed solutions that successfully cater to customers and improve CX by automating more mundane enquiries, really do have an impact on agent productivity.
Furthermore, self-service bots free up an agent’s time to deliver quality engagements with their customers, reducing overall stress. Therefore, when well-realised, self-service bots are a benefit to all, not a hindrance."
Spraetz: "An effective gamification strategy, based on measurable rules and metrics that align with a company’s goals, can help businesses motivate and engage their remote contact center agents.
Gamification, an extension of performance management and Workforce Optimization (WFO), incorporates game elements into agents’ day-to-day activities. It helps agents remain focused with a variety of pre-defined games and challenges, including personalized avatars associated with their rewards and achievements.
Gamification can create a sense of healthy competition and interaction among dispersed teams as agents compete to win both virtual and real-life prizes – from recognition to cash. It also allows supervisors to reward continued learning, good performance and positive behavior.
Integrating gamification with agent performance dashboards allows agents to access their daily metrics and easily engage in games and challenges tied to performance goals."
Bauserman: "Keeping agents engaged is all about preserving the flexibility that working remotely offers, while making sure they feel recognized, connected to their teammates and the company culture and on track to achieve their career goals. That’s a lot of ground to cover, and I’ve found that AI-driven WFM (Workforce Management) tools help set agents up for success in all those areas, whether they work remotely or in a hybrid setup.
Automation frees up agents from more mundane, time-zapping tasks. AI can also fuel real-time feedback and guidance for both specific interactions and an agent’s broader skills development and career growth.
Having clear, instant feedback is a win-win. It helps agents create better customer experiences while helping them to stay proactive and engaged and have greater ownership over their career trajectory.
According to an ICMI study, the number one factor that contributes to agent satisfaction is rewards and recognition. Within a hybrid workforce model, it’s best to have an automated strategy that can reach both at-home and remote workers equally and consistently. Using an integrated gamification platform to create challenges around KPIs is a powerful tool that helps employees meet goals while bonding with their teams."
Singer: "It’s all about Engagement. The live agents have to feel supported and connected, not like they ‘alone on an island’. This has to be a cultural imperative that is supported by the right tools and technology.
For example, employee communities as a ‘virtual water cooler’ to bring back that connection outside of ‘work questions’. Automated quality solutions feeding live coaching sessions let the agents know that their work is important and that their managers are connected/invested in them. And, mobile collaboration-oriented (e.g. shift swap/request) Workforce Management (WFM) tools let them manage their work/life balance when and where they want to."
What analytics tools are out there to help measure agent productivity?
Allan: "We partner with market-leading technology providers, such as Indicate me and EvaluAgent, to help our customers measure, track and improve agent productivity. Indicate me provides a 360-degree view of contact centre performance, including average handling time and efficiency, to help managers track productivity and identify areas for improvement. EvaluAgent then specialises in quality assurance, helping businesses close the loop with streamlined agent evaluation processes to solve problems and achieve results faster. Both of these solutions integrate seamlessly with our Contact Centre."
Noone: "Agent productivity is typically a composite of efficiency, customer effort and interaction demand. These key measures impact productivity more than almost all other KPI’s.
Many tools are available to analyse productivity, ranging from raw statistical analysis through to AI- driven technologies with machine learning ML-based self-tuning capabilities. The latter is able to adjust workflow, interaction models, contextual routing and even staffing models based on the A or ML-based performance analysis of the contact centre’s KPis and forecast data.
Recent research undertaken by Davies Hickman, and commissioned by Odigo, has revealed that 89% of European executives believe that AI-based customer experience (CX) solutions will contribute to future business success. In contrast 81% believe that their organisation’s lack of AI knowledge stops investment in these technologies. Education in this area, aligned with vendor simplification of the technology deployment options, will ensure that these AI-based productivity tools become mainstream.
Finally, these technologies must be deployed while considering the contact centre’s specific function and goals, both now and in the future. Generally, a combination of outside-in (CSAT, NPS, and CES), inside-out (attrition, ESAT, and FCR) and fiscal analysis (ROI, ROCE, and cost), is key to measuring agent productivity."
Spraetz: "Augmenting traditional quality management (QM) with integrated interaction analytics greatly widens the scope and effectiveness of measuring and managing agent productivity.
The ability of interaction analytics to analyze and score agent performance across 100% of captured customer interactions, both voice and digital, solves traditional QM issues around low sample rates, including the potential for scoring bias due to overweighting of statistical outliers and overlooking critical performance gaps.
That’s not to say that traditional QM no longer delivers business value. Integrated interaction analytics makes a QM program more efficient and effective. It does this by automating and improving the process for finding and assigning interactions for manual evaluation.
