Three steps to supercharge your agents and streamline your customer journey

Contact centre agents work with the difficult objectives of optimising the customer experience while at the same time reducing the cost of each customer conversation.

It’s a challenging catch-22 and stressed contact centre agents invariably mean unhappy customers.

That’s why it’s important to make sure that your agents have the best support possible, particularly during peak times. With the right technology, augmented agents find it far easier to delight the customer with tailored, helpful and, importantly, efficient service.

Here are three key steps to making sure that your contact centre technology is supercharging your agents and improving the customer journey:

1.  Use collaborative intelligence: human and machine

In today’s competitive market, the race to drive down cost and achieve the highest level of customer service often sees contact centres investing in artificial, instead of human, intelligence. In fact, the best approach is to focus on collaborative intelligence — assisting your contact centre agents by equipping the whole customer journey with the same level of machine assisted learning.

This means that your AI system can learn from the conversations it has with the customer, as well as the conversations your agents have with the customer. All of the information it gathers is then made available to your agents — so they have access to the wealth of knowledge management that your AI system has, including customer data and solutions. This helps agents to provide customers with a more personal service and makes sure that the customer journey is consistent, whether they deal with agent or AI. 

Collaborative intelligence also means agents and AI both interact in a seamless manner with the customer — often at the same time. For example, intelligent analytics can be used while an agent speaks with a customer, using voice analytics to provide the agent with suggested information to solve a customer’s problem, and so helping them to resolve any issues efficiently. This collaborative intelligence is the best way to support agents to provide consistently high-levels of efficient customer service.

1.  Integrate your knowledge management system, CRM and ACD solutions

Another important aspect of supercharging your agents is to have a holistic knowledge management system that draws from all the channels customers contact you on.

In the race to adopt various digital technologies, many organisations have found themselves in a situation where their customer contact is routed through two systems — a CRM which deals with digital channels and an ACD which deals with customer calls. The problem with this is that, invariably, the systems don’t share information with one another, so the prioritising of customer contact is sub-optimal. This adds enormous pressure to agents as high priority calls are left waiting while agents instead work on less urgent enquiries.

By making sure that your systems are integrated, you’re in control of all the touch points and can decide your priorities — helping your agents to provide customers with the best possible solution as efficiently as possible.

1. Balance best of breed with an efficient IT footprint

There’s now a huge range of technology available, all focusing on different areas of your contact centre function, from workforce management to customer voice analytics and speech transcription. But adding various forms of best of breed technology on an ad-hoc basis can create a minefield of technology for your agents to learn. It can also slow down an agents’ ability to solve customer issues, leaving customers frustrated and agents stressed.

Incubating the right technology and leaving the smallest possible IT footprint helps to ensure that your technology is integrated in a streamlined and optimal way. This creates a clear end-to-end journey for customer contact, making the process more efficient for agents to solve customer problems promptly. By investing in a single transformation plan, you make sure that your agents have a clear, 360 degree view of the customer environment in a single, efficient system. What’s more, you benefit from more predictable costs for the lifetime of your technology, including during peak times — so you can plan your investment in your pool of agents more accurately.

Supporting your journey to supercharge your agents

We understand the pressure that your contact centre agents are under and why it’s important your technology solutions support them from the moment they’re implemented. That’s why we offer predictable costs, in-life management and global concurrency across our systems. And, because we incubate the technologies we recommend, we understand the benefits and how to get the best from every solution.