At the start of every new year, we see a wealth of information about “what to watch for” in the coming months, or “what we can expect to see in the new year.” This type of information spans every industry as leaders and experts weigh in on issues that will be affecting their industry or technology that is on the horizon that promises to be revolutionary. Well, in this, our first blog of 2019, we plan to do the same!
In a recent article in ICMI, Jeremy Watkin details 5 Contact Center Tech Upgrades to Consider in 2019. This is a great read that details a number of ways to enhance agent performance, which we believe is foundational to running a successful contact center. We’d like to share a couple of points that we found especially helpful.
CONSIDERATIONS FOR 2019
Innovation
Innovation will be crucial going forward. Finding new ways for agents to communicate within their organizations in an effort to improve knowledge and efficiency will be a big focus moving forward. One such tool that is proving to be useful is Slack; an easy and efficient inter-office communication tool. Slack is proving to be a great way for agents to get customer issues resolved. Agents send out communication via Slack on behalf of a customer allowing all the agents to respond. With a quick and broad means of communicating within the office, the servicing agent can quickly resolve the customer issue. Once the issue is “tagged” in Slack as resolved, all the agents can see this and they’re armed with new information going forward that will assist them as they serve customers.
What’s great about these internal communication tools, such as Slack, is that they become a knowledge or educational base for the agents. Agents can refer back to this conversation when this or similar issues come up again. Here at Centris, we are big advocates of any tool that equips our agents to better assist our customers. While Slack isn’t the only inter-office communication platform available, it is proving to be very useful in the contact center.
Agent Support and Development
Agent support and development will be another top consideration this year. One of the biggest issues that continues to plague contact centers is agent turnover. A certain amount of turnover is expected, however, if a contact center is experiencing a significant amount of turnover, it’s time for them to examine how they support and develop their agents. The contact center is a busy place, especially in certain seasons. When the work environment is busy and fast-paced, it can be easy to lag behind on agent support. However, agents who feel supported and equipped to do their jobs well, tend to be agents that stick around.
Contact center managers have recognized this in recent years and begun to make huge gains in this area. One of the reasons for this shift is because the contact center is no longer seen as “back-office” support but instead is basically on the “front-lines” of customer support. If agents are not supported then it’s very likely that the customer will not be supported either. Here is an easy way to integrate more agent support and development in the contact center.
Provide microlearning opportunities for agents: Microlearning opportunities are basically short-targeted lessons for learning a new skill or technology. Microlearning can be used in the following ways:
- Short E-learning lessons
- Short instructional videos
- Interactive learning platforms
While the contact center is a busy place, there are “lull” times between calls that can serve as a good learning time for agents. Since we are a technology-driven industry, we are also a rapidly changing industry and it is essential that we keep up with the changes as they occur; this often requires training. However, long training sessions are difficult to schedule and impractical in the contact center. In addition, shorter more targeted lessons can be a much more effective way to learn and then quickly implement the lesson. These methods of training are beginning to gain traction in the contact center and will likely be the way much training is done going forward.
TAKE-AWAY
What we found very interesting and actually quite refreshing, is that two of the primary considerations for the contact center in 2019 focuses on the agent rather than the customer. This is not to imply that the customer is not important; in fact quite the opposite. What this does reveal is that contact centers are understanding how vital good agents are to the customer experience. In order to have happy customers, we need to have happy agents and the way to accomplish this is to invest in them and give them the time, tools and support they need to succeed.
