The Synergy of Agent Experience and Customer Experience: Creating a Winning Combination!

In today’s competitive world, it has become necessary to focus on customer experience because happy clients can change the whole business game.

Nowadays, clients have high demands and more awareness about the competition and their rights. Additionally, retaining clients by delivering them a good experience can help any business in making more profit because these customers will give continuous business.

Moreover, they can become your brand advocate. This fact has influenced how businesses operate nowadays. They heavily invest in tools like a contact center solution, so clients can be guided across the journey and excellent customer experience can be delivered. 

In this chase of delighting customers businesses are missing out on an important tactic. Your customers are handled by your customer care representatives, which are commonly referred to as agents in the industry. Along with customer experience, you must focus on agent experience.

The synergy of positive agent and client experience can create a winning situation for any business. In fact, improving agent experience is the fundamental need of your business if you really want to improve overall customer satisfaction.

What is agent experience?

As the name suggests, the overall experience of your agents working with your customers and business is referred to as agent experience. It can be influenced by various factors such as:

• Skill and experience 

• Targets

• Types of customers

• Workload 

• Stress 

• Infrastructure and technological tools like DialShree: omnichannel contact center solution

• Work environment 

• Work life balance 

• Awards, rewards, and other motivations

• Package 

• And more

Why does the positive experience of agents matter?

There are multiple reasons to keep agents happy and all of them directly or indirectly affect the experience of clients. 

Brand

Agents are the face of your company and they directly get engaged with clients. They are representing your brand and that is why they will define how your brand will be built in front of your clients. Happy agents are likely to deliver better service to clients and improve their overall experience.

Moreover, professional and personalized service delivery using the best contact center solution will help a business to get better business and augmented reputation in the industry. We all agree with the fact, customers love to connect with brands even if they charge high prices.

Productivity

Another reason that makes the experience of agents necessary is productivity. According to the statistics shared by McKinsey & Company, happy agents are 3x times better at delivering better customer service to resolve their concerns efficiently (Source).

If your agents are unhappy, then even if you use the best tools like DialShree: omnichannel contact center solution, you would not be able to make any change in your customer care game. The productivity of agents is also associated with improving overall customer experience.

Your agents will be able to deliver an empathetic experience to customers, which will improve overall customer satisfaction. Moreover, more productive agents will be able to attend to more clients. This will reduce call queues, call waiting time, call hold time, and other major KPIs that directly impact the experience of clients.

Attrition

One of the major challenges that businesses face is a high attrition rate in their customer support team. This causes a major challenge to businesses and managers because it directly impacts daily customer care campaigns. According to the statistic shared by Yahoo, 47% of managers face major challenges in improving the experience of clients because of high attrition rates and absenteeism (Source). 

Companies invest a lot of money in training agents to use tools like DialShree: omnichannel contact center solution correctly, deliver excellent services to clients, complete administrative jobs, and more. They are also trained about the product or service for which they handle client calls.

When agents leave the job, managers face a gap in a trained and skilled resource, which is time consuming to fill even after hiring an experienced agent. On the other hand, happy agents will stay for longer and help you cater to clients with positive experiences.

How to create a synergy of agent and customer experience?

You must have realized now that the agent experience is as important as the positive experience of customers. In fact, it is necessary to keep a balance between agent and client experience to create a synergy. Here are a few effective tips to follow to build synergy.

Build a motivated and stress-free environment

A positive work environment is not only the demand or desire, but also the right of all employees, including customer care agents. In the customer care industry, the work environment is often awful because of yelling customers, extremely high expectations, and low wages compared to the effort they put in. Thus, it is necessary to build a motivated and stress-free environment.

You can get the best tools and infrastructure to reduce workload by automating several repetitive tasks. You can also announce some rewards, awards, celebrations, and more to keep agents happy and motivated.

Receive feedback from agents

Agents often get scolded for poor performance, unhappy clients, and several other reasons. This is one of the major reasons behind the increased rate of unhappy agents that keep on shuffling jobs to get appreciation and empathy. To improve the experience of your agents, you can keep a session in which they can share their feedback to improve processes, protocols, technology, tools, and more.

Your agents know much more than you because they use tools every day and engage with clients every minute. You must keep an open-minded environment in which agents feel secure and comfortable about sharing their experiences. 

Provide constructive training and coaching

A majority of call centers and businesses provide the required training to agents so they can deliver a positive experience to customers. These trainings are often general on topics like product knowledge, business protocols, ways to handle clients, and more. It is necessary to provide personalized training to agents.

You can either divide groups based on their skills to provide specific training. You can also ask agents to get help whenever they feel like it. You can also use coaching tools available in a contact center solution to identify weak areas of agents and provide them with group or real time training.

Flexibility to work remotely

Whether you like it or not, the remote work environment is real and it is here to stay. After COVID, employees have gotten used to and comfortable with remote jobs and this has been one of the reasons for mass resignations when those firms called their employees back to the office.

Even if you want to re-open your office premises, you have to give flexibility to agents to choose whether they want to work from the office or home. This will give them a sense of satisfaction and authority to choose how they want to work. 

Conclusion 

To achieve your goal of improving customer experience, you will have to consider the experience of agents. In simple words, happy agents will keep your clients happy. With the right approach, tools, and strategy, this tough looking task can be made easy. 

We have already shared the best practices that you must follow to improve the agent experience. Moreover, we also provide tools like DialShree: omnichannel contact center solution to help in building a strong infrastructure that can reduce the stress of agents with its automation and AI driven features. Contact us now to Know More About DialShree!