The role of contact centre employees has changed significantly in recent years. The arrival of AI, chatbots and webforms has encouraged customer self-service, leaving dedicated agents to handle the more complex issues requiring knowledge, understanding and empathy. But these employees are also increasingly working from home a few days each week, remote from colleagues and support. They are targeted with achieving more first-time resolutions, irrespective of the complexity of each case. And they are expected to use an array of complex, interacting collaborative technologies – that may or may not operate seamlessly together. So how can a business optimise the digital employee experience for these increasingly valuable brand custodians?
Valued resource
Contact centre agents are no longer the most junior, undervalued employees in the business. Today, they are transitioning up the value chain, recognised as brand ambassadors, empowered to handle those complex customer interactions that cannot be managed through self-service technologies. Yet despite the elevation and recognition, contact centre managers continue to struggle with high levels of staff churn, leading both to additional costs and disruption that can undermine the quality of the customer experience (CX).
Contact centre agents are no longer the most junior, undervalued employees in the business.
In an increasingly complex contact centre environment, it is now vital to understand the day-to-day digital employee experience (EX) of agents and its impact on their ability to deliver a great CX. It is no longer enough to track the standard key performance indicators (KPIs), such as call resolution, call abandonment and agent occupancy. Businesses need to understand how technology is affecting the experience and as a result influencing performance.
Call answer rate may be well within target, but if the video or voice quality is poor, what is the impact on the CX? Is one agent’s performance dropping because customers are unable to hear properly and therefore abandoning the call? When staff are both increasingly skilled and hard to attain, no business can afford to lose talent due to technical problems.
Complex contact centres
The challenge is that these individuals are typically using multiple tools across many diverse networks, creating a complex picture for IT to unravel. Indeed, in many cases the system uptime figures will look great – and the business will be blind to the specific problems affecting one or more agents. In these complex, multi-tiered environments it is now essential to achieve a single source of end-to-end monitoring. With one tool, a business can quickly identify the problems and the cause, such as the need to improve capacity to avoid call quality dropping when the contact centre is busy.