Running a Contact Center is a never-ending race. Managers today are expected to improve customer experience results, increase agent performance and run the business at peak efficiency, and if these super high expectations are not enough, digital savvy customers are also increasing their expectations, demanding higher standards of service.
But in many cases contact centers managers are still using the same methods and processes designed before the digital revolution. They use inflexible processes to: schedule shifts, evaluate performance and coach agents. These processes require a lot of manual work and limit their ability to impact the business. This results in unhappy employees, all getting the same generic guidance, not fully equipped to deal with angry customers and feeling a lack of empowerment.
So what do contact center managers need to do to drive both agent performance and customer experience? They need to create an adaptive contact center!
Adaptive contact centers are all about personalization, they understand that customer service agents have a huge impact on driving the customer experience. This is why leading contact centers adjust themselves to bring agents a new level of empowerment. Adaptive contact centers understand that in order to succeed it’s not enough to know your customer and manage that relationship you also need to know the agent that’s taking care of the customer and manage that relationship. Adaptive contact centers build comprehensive agent profiles based on existing measured data such as: customer satisfaction scores, average handle time, training & evaluation history, tenure, past experience, education, etc. and on new data created by applying analytics to customer interactions to identify and categorize all observed behaviors. The agent profile then becomes the engine to all processes revolving around the agent.
Think about flexible scheduling that takes into consideration the persona of each agent as well as expected needs, for example an agent who’s performing best in the morning and is very good at dealing with angry customers will automatically get incentives to do retention shifts in the morning. Think about HR automatically getting the desired profile and characteristics for the new agents needed for the coming holiday season, based on the profiles of successful agents so far, saving the required time and effort needed in order to build this profile manually and deliver it to HR.
It may sound like a dream but it’s not. Adaptive Service is here and it’s only the beginning. Knowing who your agents are, what are their strengths and weaknesses, and having the right tools in place to utilize this information will transform your business into the digital age, empower your agents, optimize their performance and improve your customer experience.