The role of the contact centre agent has evolved considerably in recent years with the rise of automation and self-serve technologies abstracting away many enquiries, to leave the most complex and nuanced interactions in the hands of an increasingly specialized workforce.
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Lauren Comer[/caption]
Ensuring those agents are engaged and supported while working efficiently and productively is an essential balancing act for contact centre management, wherever people are working — as Lauren Comer, Principal Product Marketing Manager at NICE, explained:
“It’s about ensuring your agents are as productive as possible, without burning them out. It’s easy to be driven by a continual push for improved metrics, but you have to consider the human component.”
Respecting agent time and commitment
Such as, making sure you play fair when circumstances change — like a lower-than-anticipated call volume. Rather than sending an agent home/offline involuntarily, you can plan ahead to make better use of the slack time:
“We often hear sales and support teams saying, oh, we don’t have time for training…,” Comer continued. “But we can leverage unexpected downtime to develop agent skills, and bring their proficiencies to the next level.”
By embedding workforce engagement tools like learning and coaching materials right into the call handling interface, agents can access timely and relevant training between calls, turning idle time into productive professional development, while remaining in a ready/available state to take calls.
“When a contact comes in, the coaching window just seamlessly goes to the side”, Comer explained, “and keeps their place marked where they were. Then, when they’re done with that customer, they can pick up exactly where they left off, with their coaching package or quality evaluation.”
Productive use of the entire shift
This is a really big deal, because by smartly interweaving learning experiences in this way, agents can continually enhance their skills and develop themselves — which helps customers, and improves all the important metrics for success.
The important thing is having the right information available, to really make the most of those little slices of time as they occur. “One of the biggest differentiators in terms of agent and contact centre productivity is having a truly unified agent interface.
