This year, it’s safe to say that AI has gone from alluring buzzword to outright game-changer. 

ChatGPT has led the charge and is currently disrupting entire industries and ways of working. We’re just beginning to understand its time-saving and productivity-boosting applications, advancements that were once only available to those with a certain level of technical know-how but are now open to the general public.

Is ChatGPT here to steal our jobs?

Despite all the positives, there is still some trepidation, especially when it comes to ChatGPT potentially replacing customer service jobs – we even held our most popular webinar ever on this (check out the on-demand version here).

Though this hesitancy is totally understandable, the reality is, there’s no need to worry. Human agents are more necessary than ever, with AI applications simply automating some of the most tedious aspects of an agent’s day-to-day and giving them more time to focus on important tasks that require a human touch. This has the potential to improve both employees’ lives, with better, more interesting tasks and your company’s bottom line.

An ideal customer service team consists of employees whose skills complement each other. AI chatbots are not exempt from this. When you introduce AI into your team, it should complement the skills your employees already possesses. So, let’s get into why your service team is about to fall in love with customer service chatbots. 

3 reasons your customer service team will love chatbots 

1. Better & more meaningful work

Data entry is for machines, not for people! Chatbots are great for this very reason: they can take over repetitive, manual tasks on a scale that saves your team a ton of time every week.

Customer service teams enjoy an unfortunate tradition of low levels of engagement at work which goes hand-in-hand with high employee turnover. This is expensive and bad for the customer experience. 

But providing opportunities for meaningful work can directly counteract this. According to a Gallup report, “the workforce of today is motivated by opportunities to develop and possess a sense of purpose with regard to their work.” Unfortunately, customer service representatives spend a substantial number of hours on manual, repetitive work that doesn’t contribute to a sense of purpose.

Introducing chatbots to your service channel mix doesn’t mean replacing employees with technology, but rather applying tools to make their work more engaging, less repetitive, and fundamentally more valuable. The tools are already here; you can use AI to get agents up-to-speed on a customer issue, to draft responses for agents, to respond to a customer’s query via self-serve, and more.

Algorithms can be far more powerful than humans in big-data analysis or pattern recognition, and chatbots are much more adept at quickly and accurately collecting contact tracking information. When applied to customer service, they can help identify underlying issues in the customer journey, and improve the customer experience as a result. 

2. Improved working conditions

Customer service runs on empathy, but at the same time, it’s not exactly known for being an easy gig with great hours. Virtually no one contacts customer service because they’re happy with something. Working in customer service inherently means dealing with unhappy customers who need help solving an issue. Keeping your team’s tank running on empathy and not on empty is vital.

It’s well known in the industry that stress, pressure, and angry customers can have a toll on the well-being and mental health of employees. This is where customer service chatbots can step in and take some of the heat; they can be used as gatekeepers, fielding incoming requests and helping to lighten the overall workload and lower the stress levels of your agents. 

Great customer service representatives are, by definition, very empathetic people – but even if their “empathy reserves” are larger than average, they are still using a mental resource with limitations. Repetitive requests and angry customers can cause “compassion fatigue,” which lowers service quality. 

But it’s not only about repetition of tasks or angry customers. Many customer service departments have tough shift limitations and demanding weekend work, which can impact employee morale in the long run. Many organizations also apply “vacation blackouts” during peak seasons. 

For employees who pursue a career in customer service, it gets harder and harder to balance a demanding work schedule with friends, family, or even personal time. Ultimately, this stress can cause your best and most senior employees to leave their jobs.

AI-powered chatbots can help out with this, too. Available around the clock, they can reduce the need for weekend work or night shifts and can help mitigate the sky-high demands of the peak season. 

Looking after the well-being of your customer service employees is not only about treating your team with compassion (though, this is the most important thing!), but it’s also a wise business decision long-term. Reducing employee turnover will have a significant impact on onboarding, training, and overall hiring costs, not to mention overall customer satisfaction and service quality. 

3. Automation makes people happy and more satisfied 

An interesting thing about automation is that it actually makes your staff happier: 92% of companies have seen an increase in their overall employee satisfaction after introducing automation.

This is because people inherently want to feel like their time and work has value. Employees don’t want to feel like they’re wasting their time – they want to do valuable work that’s good for the business. 

So from an employer’s standpoint, AI chatbots are actually a big opportunity: rarely does saving costs in the service department also make staff happy. Automation and AI can be an affordable and efficient way to increase employee satisfaction on the service floor and retain that top talent that defines the service quality and ensures your customers keep coming back for more.

Help your team help you

Great customer service agents genuinely love helping people and taking this trait for granted is a big mistake. By applying the right kind of technologies in your service organization, you can help your team shine and do what they do best. Download our eBook, Beginner’s Guide to Customer Service Chatbots to get started today.

So, you’ve successfully hired your latest cohort of customer service agents—that’s great! But don’t get too carried away with the celebrations just yet… It’s time to get these new hires onboarded. 

Agent onboarding is the most important part of getting your new customer service agents acclimated to the business and prepared to dive head-first into their new roles. Not only that, but a positive onboarding experience also engages employees and leads to a motivated workforce that is more likely to be committed to the company long-term.

In fact, research shows that there’s a strong correlation between a well-planned and structured agent onboarding process and a high employee retention rate. When new hires take part in a structured onboarding process, retention can improve by as much as 82 percent, with productivity gains of up to 70 percent.

At the same time, it’s important to be mindful that you are investing significant time, effort, and money into onboarding your new agents, so you need to do all you can to ensure that your onboarding process is not just well-structured but also efficient and streamlined. 

Effective onboarding practices help new agents play a bigger role in the organization, sooner, and contribute towards organizational goals.

So, what makes for a good agent onboarding process?

While there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to onboarding, every company and its needs are different, after all, there are some elements that the most successful processes share:

• Operational: New agents should be given access to everything they need (materials, knowledge, colleagues who can assist) to get the best start in their new roles.
• Social: New agents should instantly feel welcomed and that they are a part of the team. Coaching teams should promote relationship-building among colleagues and managers. 
• Strategic: New agents should get to know the organization: its organizational structure, vision, mission, goals, culture, and any other key elements, and be able to reflect this knowledge in their work from the get-go. 

Optimizing the agent onboarding process with quality assurance (QA)

One way you can optimize and streamline your agent onboarding process is to leverage quality assurance (QA). Here’s how: 

1. Create test and evaluation strategies

It doesn’t do anyone any good to spend time and money on onboarding a new hire only to find out that they don’t have the necessary soft skills and competencies for the role. That’s why it’s so important to verify during the onboarding process that the agents you are hiring are up to the task and are likely to succeed in the role. 

One of the best ways you can assess a new hire’s suitability is to have them perform quality assurance test tasks that are similar to the tasks they’ll be performing on a day-to-day basis in their new role. 

In the case of a customer service agent, for example, you might have them complete a series of questions they may receive from customers. You can then conduct quality checks and assess their responses, gauging factors such as their communication skills, response methodology, knowledge of your systems and processes (if they applied the right resolution steps), how well they’ve understood their training, and other key factors. Then, during the first few months especially, you can leverage your set QA criteria to evaluate their real-life interactions with customers.  

2. Use test results to help agents transition into their new roles

While your new agents might have prior experience in customer service, they still need to learn the ins and outs of their new role.

Your QA process should be leveraged to not only test your new customer service agents but also to access test results and turn them into learning opportunities. Having a QA tool that also accounts for agent development, so that feedback is followed by coaching sessions is also key. 

Your customer service agents should be able to access all relevant information through the QA tool, both empowering them to take charge of their own success and promoting transparency. 

3. Continuously improve onboarding by evaluating existing agents

It’s important to keep your new agent onboarding updated by continuously optimizing the process. There are two main ways you might want to consider doing this:

• Finetune with existing problems: When performing QA on your current agents, identify pain points and places they struggle or fail, and use these to finetune your process and strengthen your training programs for future onboarding. 
• Automate onboarding tasks: By automating some of your onboarding tasks, you can help your coaching team become more efficient. You might also consider connecting your QA tool to a learning management system. 

4. Have your coaching team implement checks

Once the training of your new agents has been completed and they have gone through your full onboarding process, you should have your coaching team—i.e., the people who were responsible for training and onboarding—carry out their own QA process on your new agents in the form of fast checks. 

These checks should be simple and non-intrusive, designed to take a quick look at the work your new agents are completing to assess quality. For instance, your coaching team might dip in and out of the conversations your new agents are handling in their first few weeks, look at chat logs from live support, or listen to recordings of telephone conversations. 

Any shortcomings that are found can be addressed on an individual level during periodical one-to-ones and on a larger scale by making positive changes to the training and onboarding processes. 

Set your new agents up for success

The agent onboarding process is crucial for employee success and retention, and ultimately, your bottom line. 

Getting it right is of the utmost importance. But, given that the average new hire onboarding experience consists of over 50 individual activities, it can be easy to slip up. 

Streamlining your process and carrying out thorough QA activities will help acclimate your new hires faster, with fewer hiccups, and set them up for success in their new roles.

A call center’s effectiveness depends on one very significant factor: the productivity of its agents. When team members are happy with their job and feel fulfilled and motivated, they are able to deliver great customer service. And when they’re tired, overworked, and dissatisfied, it reflects on their job output as well. According to a Bain & Company study, companies with the highest employee satisfaction scores often have the highest NPS, with the inverse also proving true.

Call centers are often seen as cost centers within their businesses and have traditionally been judged solely on the numbers they put out, chief among them cost per contact. As a result, the industry is known for being one of the most competitive and demanding to work in. This means ensuring agent happiness and productivity can be a difficult and overwhelming task for managers. The Great Resignation has thrown this into stark relief, with customer service enjoying the unfortunate distinction of having one of the highest employee attrition rates.

By making a few adjustments to how you run your call center, you can increase agent engagement and spark motivation. Here are some tips to get you started:

1. Give your agents autonomy

Working in a call center can sometimes become monotonous. In a lot of cases, agents follow a set system of responses, often canned ones, and processes that make them feel their job is tedious and repetitive. Even worse, agents can get stuck not being able to help valuable customers because of those processes. Giving your agents a certain degree of autonomy when it comes to how they approach customer service and some leeway to make decisions themselves can have a major impact on their productivity. They get to hone their skills, genuinely feel like they’re helping more often than not, learn to relate better to customers, and become more adept at thinking on their feet. Giving agents the power to make refunds, send new products, or make other economic decisions without needing to check in with a manager, can be massively empowering.

2. Allow agents to take frequent, short breaks

There are numerous causes of tension and stress in a call center — irate customers, deadlines, meeting quotas, and very stringent protocols that need to be followed. All of these aspects of working in a call center can add up and affect day-to-day productivity and job satisfaction. They can also prohibit agents from going above and beyond and forging emotional connections with customers which can lead to lasting loyalty. A quick solution? Give your agents the option to take short but frequent breaks throughout their shift. Whether it’s to grab a snack or a quick cup of coffee, or simply take a breather, doing so can help give them some sense of control over what’s causing their stress and improve productivity. Not to mention, breaks give agents a chance to simply reset and meet the next customer confidently with a smile. The right customer service platform will allow agents to set themselves as away or present, or even allow for simultaneous ring (letting them take calls on their mobile phone instead of at the computer if they need to walk their dog or grab some fresh air). Remember, treat your agents like you want them to treat your customers.

3. Measure agent performance and reflect together

In addition to the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that have traditionally been used to measure how well agents perform, you can also utilize newer technology to provide more specific, individualized insight into an agent’s performance and where they can improve. Making QA part of the day-to-day of your agents is a great way to continuously drive improvement and help your agents level up as well. By studying speech analytics, time spent on calls, response times, and other critical elements, you can assess what areas need improvement and coaching.

The most important part of measuring performance is to allow agents to reflect on it themselves. Being part of that process as a manager usually exposes inefficient processes and other causes of agent dissatisfaction (which often have a strong correlation to customer dissatisfaction as well). Checking in with your team and showing that you care goes a long way in helping boost team morale and, as a result, performance.

4. Be sure to recognize a job well done

Providing agents with positive feedback, incentivizing great performance, and recognizing even small achievements are great motivators for some agents. Knowing that they are making a difference to customers and the company they work for highlights their relevance and importance to the business. Treating your agents like the valued members of the team they are, will also lead to a more positive work environment which will encourage agents to stick around, saving you time and resources.

Incentives can also be an effective way to spur motivation, whether you are offering major bonuses or free lunches. Incentives can give agents an extra push to continually strive to be their best. However, if you decide to provide incentives, make sure they encourage behavior that won’t ultimately cause your business harm. For instance, incentivizing the ability to take many calls won’t always have a positive effect on performance: in some cases it can cause agents to rush through calls, often failing to adequately solve a customer’s problem, which in turn just causes the customer to call again.

5. Develop multichannel agents

In an industry where repetition is impossible to avoid, developing multichannel agents not only provides agents with a more diversified workday, but it also provides agents the opportunity to expand their skillset. Developing multichannel agents increases employee retention and reduces fatigue due to the variation in tasks.

By training agents in providing customer service on multiple channels, agents have the opportunity to uncover more of their strengths, which you can utilize to refine skill-based routing. It also allows your customer service department to deliver higher quality service, increasing customer satisfaction. All of these benefits improve agents’ overall work experience, sense of fulfillment, and productivity as a result.

It’s important that employees feel valued and relevant in an organization so they remain committed and motivated to do their jobs well. Investing in your agents will help your call center perform consistently better and retain employees. Start by implementing some of these tips and consider the benefits of running a multichannel contact center to keep morale and productivity levels consistently high.

Improving your agent experience goes a long way towards building a happier and more productive team. Our latest report, Why Service Leaders Should Focus on Improving Service from the Inside-Out, explores this in-depth and provides concrete steps to improving your agent experience.

Prioritizing the employee experience isn’t a new concept, but with employees the world over continuing to exit their jobs in droves, it’s become increasingly relevant. With customer service enjoying the unfortunate distinction of having above-average employee attrition rates, service leaders need to start prioritizing the agent experience, well, yesterday. 

Apart from retaining talent and avoiding the need to constantly onboard and train new employees—not to mention what this costs—prioritizing the agent experience can have an outsized impact on your customer experience as well. And this goes beyond the “happy agents equal happy customers” adage, which, though it sounds overly simple, has some truth to it.

In our latest report, State of the Agent Experience, our Senior Director of CX Strategy, Devin Poole, dives into exactly what has gone wrong with the agent experience and shares concrete steps service leaders can take to improve it. Devin has been researching and advising leaders in customer service and customer experience for over 16 years, having been an analyst at Gartner prior to joining Dixa. We sat down with him for his top takeaways from the report, but if you want all the goods, you can download the full report.

Hi, Devin. Thanks for being here! Let’s get started.

If you’re a service leader today, why is it important to prioritize the agent experience? And what should be top of mind for you when you think about reducing agent effort? Where do you start?

“For so many customers today, the only human experience they’ll have with your brand is through a customer service agent. So, to the customer, the agent is the living breathing manifestation of your entire company. That’s a lot of pressure to put on one person! So, our job, as leaders, is to set agents up for success by making it as easy as possible for them to focus all their energy on helping the customer. The first step to improving the agent experience—so often overlooked—is to involve your agents from the very beginning. Sit down and talk to them about the most difficult parts of their job. Watch and observe their workflows to see the pain points in action. Once you’ve done this, any actions you choose to take already have implicit buy-in from your frontline.”

We hear the term “effortless” a lot when describing an agent’s ideal workflow – yet your report talks about reducing effort. Can you explain why this is more realistic? 

“Any workflow will require at least some type of effort, but the idea here is to remove unnecessary and low-value tasks from your team’s day-to-day, freeing up agents to spend time on activities that will bring more value to the customer and the company. The desire to reduce effort and optimize our tasks is inherently human. We naturally seek out ways to make our own lives easier, finding more convenient ways to get our personal tasks done, so the same should apply to our working lives. And as I mentioned above, your frontline employees will already have lots of ideas about what would make their lives easier. But while agents will be able to provide insight into the most frustrating parts of their work, they may not be able to pinpoint exactly what’s causing the pain. This is why the observation of workflows is so important. It’s up to us as leaders to seek out the common frustration points and remove them.”  

You break down how to improve the agent experience in four steps. Could you give us a sneak peek at step number one? 

“Absolutely. The first step will come as no surprise; it’s all about automation. Agents spend a lot of time on tasks (and I’m not talking about customer issues here) that create no value for the customer but are necessary for the business to function effectively. One great example of this is the manual tagging of customer inquiries. This is really valuable information for the company to have, so you can analyze why customers are contacting you and how frequently each type of query is occurring, but not something that requires a human to complete. There are tons of great examples like this that I’ve observed in my time working with customer experience leaders, and they often get passed over in favor of the “one big gain.”  If you can find and remove two to three smaller tasks, which are usually much easier to fix, not only will your agents be much happier, but the entire service function will run much more effectively, producing higher quality experiences in more efficient ways. It’s a total win-win for leaders!”

And, last but not least, could you talk a little bit about how low agent effort can tie directly into low customer effort and an improved CSAT?

It really comes down to this question: “Where do you want your agents to focus their time and energy? On the customer or on the systems and processes they’re working with? Of course, it’s the former. When we inadvertently make the job of serving customers harder by adding too many different systems or making our agents hop from screen to screen, it’s the customer who feels the effects of that effort. They feel it in the form of long wait times, and they feel it when they’ve got to tell their story all over again. And they especially feel it when they’re stuck with an agent who lacks the skills to handle their inquiry. All of these key drivers of customer effort are directly linked to how well we set our agents up for success. 

And, if you want to hear even more from Devin on why the agent experience matters, check out this video.

If you’re a customer service leader and the Great Resignation doesn’t have you shaking in your boots, it should. We know that employee churn has always been a hot topic in customer service, but the pandemic has spurred on a never-before-seen reckoning when it comes to employee retention and satisfaction.

What is the Great Resignation?

Employees who may have “stuck it out” in jobs they didn’t love before the pandemic are now quitting in droves. Call it an awakening or call it a revolution –– you can certainly call it an exodus. “The number of Americans quitting has now exceeded pre-pandemic highs for eight straight months, as employers, especially in low-wage sectors, are struggling to fill open positions” – World Economic Forum.

And it’s not just an American trend. “Data collated by the OECD, which groups most of the advanced industrial democracies, shows that in its 38 member countries, about 20 million fewer people are in work than before the coronavirus struck,” writes Politico Europe. “Of these, 14 million have exited the labor market and are classified as ‘not working’ and ‘not looking for work.’ Compared to 2019, 3 million more young people are not in employment, education or training.” 

How do customer service agents fit into the Great Resignation?

No one ever claimed that being a customer service agent was easy, but Dixa’s latest research into the agent experience makes this abundantly clear. We surveyed 1500 customer service agents in the U.S. and U.K., and: 

• a whopping 79% of agents feel that their workload is too heavy, 
• while 64% characterize their job as stressful, 
• 51% don’t feel supported by their manager,
• and 59% lack the knowledge to provide better customer service. 

This paints a rather grim picture when it comes to agent churn risk. And with new research from Gartner showing that, on average, it takes $14,113 to hire and train a new agent, this isn’t just a morale problem but a money problem. 

It’s time for future-thinking brands to recognize customer service agents as the important players they are and put a stop to the endless cycle of hiring and training new agents.

Whether you’ve hired a famous spokesperson or currently employ a cute dog as your brand representative, the reality is, your customer service agents are the true face of your company. They shape your customer experience –– equally capable of winning hearts and minds or sending customers running into the open arms of competitors. It should go without saying that improving your agent experience will have a positive impact on your customer experience as well. 

3 strategies to improve the agent experience & beat the Great Resignation

1. Empower your customer service agents

This starts with creating opportunities for career development and advancement in your organization. You’ll never get a better manager or director than someone who’s been on the frontlines of your customer experience and knows the day-to-day ins, outs, and challenges that agents face. And when agents see opportunities for learning and growth, they’ll become more engaged and stick around for longer. 

No one likes to be micro-managed. Give agents the autonomy to make decisions that deliver value for customers and the brand. They shouldn’t need to check in with a manager to send a disappointed customer a free item, discount code, or a refund. Give them room to creatively problem-solve. A handwritten postcard with a free sample of an about-to-be-released whatever, and I’m ready to forgive my beauty subscription box provider for messing up my order. Enlist your agents as collaborators and partners and reward them for going above-and-beyond.

2. Give the gift of collaborative knowledge

Knowledge is power and collaboration is magic. Give your agents access to an intelligent knowledge base that reduces the need for them to chase information and allows them to share their knowledge with their colleagues.

A recent survey by Dixa showed 70% of agents spend time searching through internal files and folders to locate knowledge that will help them solve customer queries. Put a stop to this with an intelligent knowledge base that uses AI to automatically send prompts to agents based on the content of a customer’s question. Agents should be able to capture and store important information in one centralized, easy-to-access location. Plus, onboarding new agents becomes faster, and you’ll avoid losing access to valuable knowledge when a team member does decide to depart.

3. Get rid of micro-decisions 

Right now, your agents are likely stuck using tools and processes that don’t live up to the demands of the job. Constant fire-fighting, plus energy spent on hundreds of micro-decisions a day, can make for a high-stress environment. And to make matters worse, this environment is often characterized by fatigue, competition, repetitive tasks, and very few rewarding experiences. How do you improve this?

Start with your tech. Begin to automate mindless, repetitive tasks, and allow your agents to focus on customer inquiries that will create the most value, rather than answering requests that, quite frankly, a chatbot could answer. If your agents are still spending time looking through a shared inbox, turn to an intelligent offering system that will route customer questions to the right agent based on context. Win-win: you no longer need to worry about cherry-picking, and your agents no longer need to spend time deciding which question to answer next. And your customers? They get faster, more reliable answers. Win-win-win.

Become an agent of change in your organization

By giving agents license to solve customer problems creatively, and technology that makes their jobs easier, you’ll be able to hold on to your team for longer and improve your customer experience while you’re at it. Simply put, happy agents make happy customers. If you’re ready to become an agent of change in your organization, read our latest ebook or get in touch to see how Dixa can make your agent experience better.

A happy customer service agent isn’t an oxymoron. At least it doesn’t have to be. But even as employee happiness and retention efforts have entered the spotlight in recent months—under pressure from the Great Resignation—a group of all-too-worthy participants has been overlooked…

After spending time with hundreds of customer service managers and agents in organizations all over the world, a clear pattern has emerged. Organizations with a high agent churn rate (a sure sign of agent dissatisfaction) are failing to offer their employees something very fundamental: the right tools to thrive in a job that can be, quite frankly, really hard. 

By implementing the following three pillars, you can improve your agent experience, reduce your employee churn rate, and improve your customer satisfaction while you’re at it. Before we jump in, let’s start with what every good pillar needs—a strong foundation.

Build a Strong Foundation by Empowering Your Agents

No matter how much money you spend on marketing, optimizing your user journey, or refreshing your brand identity, when it comes down to it, your frontline agents are the true face of your company—their interactions with customers shape your customer experience. Treat them like the partners they are, rather than just pawns you’re moving around on a chess board.

Implement a Schedule & Stick to It

Let your agents know in advance which channels they’re scheduled to work on and during which time periods. And no last-minute changes! Having access to a clearly-defined plan they can trust lets them know what to expect out of the day. You can even take this one step further and allow them to control which contact channels they are available on and when.

The Proof is in the Pudding

An employee survey at a large meal kit company in the US showed that changing agents’ work schedules on short notice was a cause of great frustration, making agents feel powerless and contributing to employee churn. After adjusting the process so agents could expect to stay on the channels they were scheduled to work on, employee satisfaction increased significantly. Agents felt much more empowered and in control of their work which is critical to job satisfaction.

Once you’ve got your foundation in place, you can start by building the first pillar.

Pillar #1: What

Give your agents much-needed context with a clear overview of customer interactions across all channels.

The first pillar of agent happiness is also the most obvious: What is the customer contacting you about? What have they contacted you about in the past, on what channels, and what was the outcome? Having an easy-to-access overview of all contacts across every channel gives agents an understanding of what the customer’s current issue is as well as how it relates to previous questions.

In the excellent book, The Effortless Experience by Matthew Dixon, having to repeat basic information is a key driver of customer disloyalty. This was confirmed by recent research conducted by Dixa. You can avoid this by giving your agents access to context for previous conversations and interactions. This helps your agents deliver a better customer experience and saves them from dealing with frustrated customers.

And there’s an added benefit: customers feel comfortable reaching out to you on different channels and are empowered to switch from channel to channel without fear of needing to repeat themselves each time. This flexibility should be par for the course in 2022, and offering channel equality in your customer service solution will help you do this.

Pillar #2: Who

Make sure your agents have the information they need to offer personal experiences at scale.

Pillar two covers the customer. Who are they? How much money have they spent with you in the past? What’s their delivery address? Pull this information in from your backend system and show it to your agents. Key information like whether or not the customer is a VIP, or the last item they ordered and its shipment status will allow your agents to deliver personalized, conversational service, and quickly turn a negative situation into a positive one. 

Customers want to feel heard and understood when they reach out with a problem. Giving your agents proper context will allow them to deliver “plus one service” as my friend, CX consultant Micah Solomon calls it. If the customer is a VIP, give your agents the autonomy to offer full refunds, discount codes, or new items on the spot, if there’s a problem. 

Even small gestures can go a long way. If the customer’s last order was a pair of sneakers, it’s easy to start a conversation about that item. “Did the sneakers fit or were they a gift for someone?”. It can also eliminate the need for customers to express what the issue is about, as the contact reason can often be found in the available data—as long as your agents can access it!

Pillar #3: How

Give your agents access to the knowledge they need to solve customer questions—right at their fingertips. 

Asking your agents to solve customer questions without easy access to a knowledge base is like asking a marathon runner to wear running shoes that don’t fit: a waste of time and also a little painful. With a trusted knowledge base, agents can rest easy knowing the information they’re providing to customers is 100% accurate. And customers will always get a consistent answer regardless of the agent they’re connected with. Not to mention all the time saved not having to search through messy shared documents, or even worse, spent googling answers to commonly asked questions. 

An integrated knowledge base driven by machine learning is ideal, as it will send automatic prompts to agents based on the context of the customer question. So the correct support article will automatically be shown to agents based on the customer’s inquiry. 

Knowledge also ties into the other two pillars: if the customer has a question about the delivery status of their order, the system can use AI to determine that the issue type is “delivery.” Once this has been determined, it can add a tag to the conversation, allowing the agent to see what the issue is about immediately.

It should also be possible for agents to interact with this contextual knowledge, marking an article as useful once it’s helped to solve an issue, prompting updates if something needs to be edited, adding comments, and even adding drafts for new articles when they encounter a new issue.

Happy Agents Make Happy Customers

There’s a reason that ancient Greek columns from antiquity can still be found today: when you build something the right way, on a strong foundation, it tends to stick around! If you take the time to build a lasting foundation and ensure these three pillars are in place, your agents will know what the customer’s issue is about, who the customer is, and how to solve the customer’s problem. You’ll see a remarkable transformation in your agent experience, a reduction in handling and response times, and even an increased CSAT because happy agents make happy customers.

Support teams bear the brunt of customer frustrations, and during times of upheaval, this only increases. As crucial advocates for your business, how do you create an environment where agents feel empowered to do their best work?

It’s not always easy being on the front line of customer service.

Even with the most satisfied customer base, mistakes can happen and issues arise. As a result, customer service agents need to be prepared for rough waters as well as smooth sailing and know how to navigate customer complaints with a ‘can do’ attitude.

The thing is, productivity can plummet if the problems start to pile up. Try putting yourself in an agent’s shoes, and imagine that complex issues and dissatisfied customers were awaiting you at every turn, each time you answered the phone or received an email. How would you feel?

You probably wouldn’t be all that keen to come into work every day. Luckily, the reverse can also be true. If the majority of an agent’s day is spent having efficient conversations where they can problem solve for happy customers, then they will naturally experience higher levels of satisfaction and fulfillment.

And, because we know that positivity begets positivity, they’ll pass on the good vibes to the next customer they speak to.

The link between happy agents and happy customers is undeniable

If you’re wondering whether happy agents make for happy customers, then the answer is a big, resounding ‘Yes!’.

In fact, a recent Glassdoor Economic Research study found that, “Across all companies and years, customer and employee satisfaction are positively linked,” with the relationship between the two not only increasing motivation internally but impacting commercial results positively as well.

That’s because happy customers are far more likely to recommend your product or service to their networks. And with referrals being “the most credible form of advertising,”—83% of consumers say they act on the advice of their friends and family—a happy customer can be an invaluable acquisition tool. It may seem obvious but many brands still haven’t fully grasped this yet. So here’s your big chance!

When it comes to the role satisfied customers play in profit-building, one could argue that it all starts with the individual agent. Especially given the growing role online transactions play in our shopping habits. It’s very possible that the only human-to-human interaction a customer might have with a brand is when they reach out to customer service. In these instances, the agent becomes the face of the brand and has the power to shape a customer’s entire perception of the company.

Now, let’s get down to brass tacks and take a look at the figures…

According to Harvard Business Review:

“There is a strong statistical link between employee well-being reported on Glassdoor and customer satisfaction among a large sample of some of the largest companies today. A happier workforce is clearly associated with companies’ ability to deliver better customer satisfaction—particularly in industries with the closest contact between workers and customers, including retail, tourism, restaurants, health care, and financial services.”

In fact, keeping your sales team happy can boost sales by up to 37%. What’s more, employee satisfaction adds value to your organization—landing a place on Fortune’s 100 Best Companies To Work For list can grow stock prices by 14%.

Indeed, there’s little doubt that happy agents do make happy customers, and together this contributes to a healthier bottom line.

Okay, but happiness isn’t something that you can simply summon out of thin air (we wish!). How do you foster happiness at work?

Give agents the tools they need to do the job without unnecessary stress

Your customers are omnichannel—they research, browse and buy on a variety of platforms—which means your agents need to be omnichannel too.

Investing in omnichannel customer service software gives agents the tools they need to be where the customer is when the customer needs them. Whether that’s replying to a Facebook message, following up on an email, speaking on the phone, or sending a quick text via WhatsApp.

Not only does this quite clearly improve the speed and seamlessness of the customer experience, but it also helps mix up the agents’ working day. Sitting on the other end of a continuously ringing telephone—or worse, waiting quietly for a call to come through—can be monotonous and demotivating for the best of us.

Combat this by keeping your agents active and engaged with a full offering of communication channels at their disposal.

However, this only works if all of your channels are synched up and working together. You need to have the software in place to better integrate sales and CRM data with customer service history, enhancing both the customer and agent experience.

78% of customers get frustrated if they have to repeat themselves to service agents — and who can blame them?

It’s almost unavoidable that customer service agents will have to bear the brunt of customer frustrations. However, witnessing consumer pain-points first hand puts agents in a unique (and powerful) position to improve the customer service experience.

Your service agents know a lot about the customer experience, so empower them to suggest and make changes

Who do you most trust to give honest feedback on customer satisfaction and service experience?

Chances are, it’s your customer service agents.

After all, they’re the ones out there, day after day, responding to positive and negative consumer input alike. It’s their job to resolve issues as quickly as possible, and, crucially, represent your business in the most positive light.

For agents to be the best advocates for your product or service, they need to feel capable and ready to act on what they see quickly and autonomously.

This may be as simple as being able to deal with a customer complaint without having to bring their team manager in. Or it may be as radical as becoming a ‘citizen developer’ — making use of low code software development to proactively prototype and build better customer service solutions.

Within the organization, leaders should create a culture of autonomy and trust by reaching out to customer agents for valuable insights. By doing so, you can learn a great deal about the real customer service experience, and increase employee motivation at the same time. It’s a win-win.

Lastly, use intrinsic rewards and recognition to organically motivate agents

Hard work deserves to be rewarded. But reward and recognition is about much more than a cash bonus for meeting a service target.

Whilst there will always be a place for extrinsic rewards like this, customer service managers should look to more intrinsic ways of rewarding and motivating their agents too.

Increased responsibility, such as citizen development, as well as personal development within the role, will help keep agents happy and motivated at work. Intrinsic reward comes from within—from the feeling of a job well done combined with a greater sense of purpose—so leaders should always ensure that agents know how important their job really is.

To put it bluntly: your business doesn’t just need a great customer service team, it relies upon it.

So, make sure agents feel seen, heard and valued — broadcast their achievements, recognize hard work, respond to the changes they’d like to see, and give them the tools they need to delight customers every single day.