Customer experience is a challenge for contact center agents

Offering exceptional experiences is a challenge for contact center agents. Often, contact center agents represent the front line in terms of a brand’s customer experience. Empowering agents to do their jobs more effectively is key.

According to Magnetic North, negative customer experiences cost UK brands £234 billion a year in lost sales. Now, more than ever consumers look to buy from brands that offer them great experiences. Brands are making significant investments to improve contact center agent performance and ultimately customer experience.

Improve customer experiences by extracting insights from customer interactions

Contact centers hold a wealth of information within customer interactions. From email and SMS to IVR and customer calls, contact centers must analyze and understand every customer interaction to offer exceptional and personalized experiences.

A Call Centre Helper study suggests that just 3% of customer calls are analyzed due to the associated costs and complexities of analyzing audio data. This leaves a staggering 97% of voice data untouched. This represents a huge missed opportunity for brands to truly understand their customers and offer great experiences.

Voice technology helps to improve contact center agent performance

Voice technology enables contact centers to access and analyze vast quantities of customer interactions by transforming all call data into text. Calls can then be searched and organized based on outcomes and used to provide agents with useful information such as best practices or knowledge base articles.

Voice data that is easily searchable enables contact centers to evaluate agent performance. This helps to develop more personalized training objectives for each agent to improve their performance.

Contact centers can identify agents that consistently deliver quality customer experiences. This helps contact center managers discover which agents are doing well and makes it possible to recognize high performing agents.

There are several ways that voice technology can improve call center agent performance. This section will address three: knowledge base, agent training and job satisfaction.

Voice technology provides a knowledge base to improve call center agent performance

Millions of hours of calls are recorded in contact centers every year, but until recently, this data has been difficult and expensive to access. Accessing call recordings requires specialist teams to extract data by listening to calls, making it a timely and costly process.

Voice technology makes call data accessible at scale. Text-based call data is easier to store, locate and access. Contact centers can use this data to create a knowledge base from customer interactions and agent responses.

Research from Atlassian indicates that customer satisfaction drops by 15% each time a customer has to call back to resolve their issue. When agents or customers need that extra bit of help on a call, contact centers can access the required information by transforming call recordings into text, in real-time. Contact centers can provide agents with dispute resolution best practices by extracting topics, themes and words from customer interactions. These best practices can then be indexed to deliver best-in-class support to improve customer experiences.

Empower agents to do their jobs better through improved training opportunities

Agents are a contact center’s greatest asset, so empowering them to do their jobs more effectively is vital. Agents provide significant value by delivering exceptional customer service. Contact centers can use voice technology to unlock previously untouched call data to provide agents with training and development opportunities. Transcripts can be used to identify how issues have been solved in the past to improve the customer journey and achieve first contact resolution.

By obtaining transcripts of calls, contact centers can access data and use it for compliance auditing, to accelerate dispute resolutions and achieve a better customer experience. Previously, training focused on generalized messaging to improve the customer experience. Now, with voice technology, contact centers can offer new and personalized training based on real-life interactions with customers.

Speech-to-text can improve call center efficiency by bringing training opportunities direct to the agent’s screen.

Real-time agent training

Onboarding and training agents require significant time and effort. Strategies involve shadowing senior team members and being shadowed to ensure agents are interacting with customers as expected. Voice technology can improve call center efficiency by bringing training opportunities direct to the agent’s screen in real-time. This frees up the time of senior team members and helps to equip agents with the information they need to offer best-in-class customer experience.

Real-time speech recognition can trigger workflows that assist agents as calls are happening. Rather than learning from past interactions, real-time workflows are improving contact center agent performance in real-time to steer conversations before they go off track. For example, non-compliant behavior can be mitigated by alerting a supervisor when certain words or phrases are mentioned on a call. The possibilities for improving customer experience using real-time speech recognition capabilities are endless.

Improve call center agent job performance by improving their job satisfaction

Voice technology enables contact center managers to augment their workforce. It allows contact centers to deploy sophisticated speech-enabled technology to deflect callers away from agents for high-volume, low-skilled tasks such as password resets. Offloading mundane tasks that can be performed by bots, automated systems or even through delivering better FAQs means that agents can focus on issues that only humans can solve.

Making sure that the agent’s time is used for appropriate requests means that they remain challenged, fulfilled and valued. This is important to ensure agent retention, especially after so much time and resource has been invested in their training and development. Fulfilled agents who are trained in delivering exceptional customer service are likely to improve the customer experience. Much more so than new and inexperienced agents.

Conclusion: Voice technology helps to improve contact center agent performance and improve customer experiences

Offering exceptional experiences is a challenge for contact center agents. With increased pressure from consumers, brands are investing heavily in customer experience. Contact center agents are vital to the success of these initiatives.

Contact centers are using voice technology to transform audio to text so that 100% of customer interactions can be analyzed instantly. From providing knowledge bases and call routing in real-time to informing best practices and facilitating agent training – voice technology is helping managers improve call center efficiency.

Transforming call data into text enables contact centers to combine all customer interactions from omni-channel activities and feed those insights into analytics engines to improve call center agent performance. However, even the best analytics systems require an accurate input to reach their value potential.