There are a lot of important things that business leaders need to consider when building the perfect contact centre. You need to ensure that you have the right platforms in place to support an omni-channel environment for customer contact. It’s also worth thinking about which disruptive technologies might be useful for your workplace.
However, no part of your contact centre can thrive if you don’t have the right talent in place. Unfortunately, finding the right employees for a contact centre is pretty difficult. Not only does the call centre have a bad reputation for being a gruelling and often exhausting workplace, but turnover rates usually sit at up to 45% - making it one of the highest turnover locations for any worker.
So, how can you retain your contact centre agents once you find them?
Let’s find out.
1. Deliver the Right Tools
Ultimately, there are few things more important to today’s contact centre than the right technology. We’re living in a world where chatbots and automated systems are dealing with common and repetitive issues for clients. This means that agents are left to handle the more complex queries.
To survive in this new environment, agents need support from everything from dashboards full of crucial information, to virtual assistants. A virtual assistant in a contact centre can surface contextual information about a conversation in seconds, using CRM systems and call analytics. This provides the agent with everything they need to drive a better outcome, without forcing them to jump between multiple tabs and software solutions to find what they need.
2. Empower Your Agents
As mentioned above, there’s a growing demand to remove some of the repetitive tasks from the shoulders of the contact centre agent and give them to a bot instead. Figuring out which tasks to remove from your agent’s workload could be an excellent way to reduce the amount of time they need to spend on mundane issues. The less your agent’s attention is taken up by unnecessary tasks, the more they can focus on solving complex problems. Robotic process automation and chatbots will be more vital than ever going into 2020.
Other ways to empower your agents in the new era is to make sure that the right conversations are routed to the right people. Use skills-based routing to determine that each agent can use their unique skills to deliver more satisfied clients.
3. Track, Measure and Improve
Examining and evaluating the performance of a contact centre has always been an important process. However, it’s important to make sure that you’re examining the right metrics. Today, it’s possible to look at everything from the sentiment of customers, to overall customer satisfaction. Focusing on customer-focused metrics will allow you to encourage behaviour that supports happier customers and more confident contact centre agents.