For an effective customer experience, focusing on the agent’s experiences is as important for a company as the carefully devised customer strategies.

With so many alternatives for everything coming up, brands are thriving on their customer relationships in the experience economy. Long-term growth depends on many factors that balance out the best-in-class experience strategies equation. For customer experience (CX) to be effective, those who are in the front line— the contact centre agents, are equally important as the carefully devised customer strategies.

Sir Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin, said,

“The way you treat your employees is the way they will treat your customers.”

With the proper training and tools, agents can be the best resources to customers. They can be influential brand ambassadors for the service provider. Due to this, engaging agent experience is the top priority of leaders of an organisation.

For delivering a consistent, positive Customer Experience, other executives in the market are exploring the unique needs, expectations, and wants of agents just like you do for customers.

Before we see how it is possible to improve customer experience, it is vital to know the reasons for throttling agent productivity.

The tools and the working environment are undoubtedly mundane. Answering similar queries over and over can turn out to be tedious for anyone. Adding to this, juggling between various systems for assistance frustrates the agent and hampers its productivity.

Worst part? Your customer feels it whenever your team’s frustrations start to show or the contact centre is understaffed.

Suggested Reading: 11 Signs That You Need To Better Your Customer Experience – Part I

Why Does Agent Experience Matter?

Put in one line, positive agent experience at work translates to a better customer experience. Here are some ways in which we feel a better agent experience makes a better customer experience:

1. Happier agents are helpful agents. Customer expectations are always met by well-coached agents who have stellar communication skills and offer short wait times. Getting frequent feedback empowers them to do their jobs and receive development opportunities. This makes them look for solutions for your customers even if they have to push more.

2. The more agents you have on deck to help your customers, the calmer is the crew to diagnose the issues. Agents aren’t overwhelmed with extra work and have a clear headspace. This is possible when absenteeism rates are low. This is achievable when agents feel connected to your company and set goals that drive the company’s mission.

3. Using the right contact centre tools is a critical way to improve customer experience. It enables agents to do more for customers by putting in less effort. With this, your customers get higher first call resolution, shorter wait times, and personalised service.

4. Agent experience optimisation prevents customer problems. With proactive data on hand, they can solve customer’s future issues too. With the best possible agent experience, agents pass on attentiveness to your customers for a top-notch customer experience.

Suggested Reading: 20 Tips For Effective Live Chat Support

How to Map Agent Experience to Customer Experience?

Do you want to accelerate your customer experience? Then, here are some actions you need to take to improve agent experience:

1. Self-service:

As mentioned before, it’s a daunting task for the agents to keep repeating the same set of instructions for common inquiries. For easing this, self-service in the form of searchable repositories and chatbots is taking centre stage.

Companies with good troubleshooting articles set up a knowledge base that helps both the customer and the agent assist customers.

On the other hand, chatbot technology is here to stay and has been widely accepted by consumers worldwide. The best part is that it helps in live troubleshooting, unlike messages and e-mails. Thus, automation is the future of customer experience.

2. Machine Learning:

It is omnipresent. In situations where self-service fails, machine learning does the task.

Agents are supposed to prioritise, categorise and assign queries. Not to mention but this high-volume activity is dull, and its accuracy is dependent on the knowledge level of the agent.

With supervised machine learning, agents can identify sorting patterns from prior work, and the accuracy and speed beat that of humans.

Suggested Reading: Faster, Smarter, Better — AI Is Improving Customer Service

3. Connecting systems:

Agents’ work requires shifting between multiple disconnected systems to perform more time-consuming and challenging tasks.

Navigating between systems makes customer interaction difficult, which is essential to solving a problem. Therefore, it is crucial to connect the needed systems.

Streamlining the interface is the next step once things are connected. By observing how agents interact with the case management system, one can improve the environment.

Many customer support automation platforms such as Verloop.io can also help agents find timely solutions and help in speed answering.

4. Right agent treatment

With products and services continually changing, customer service agents experience daily stress.

Handling customer temperament with systems working against them is tedious and repetitive. This makes retaining agents an issue. As quoted in the beginning, we need to reverse the trend. Agents need an efficient work environment free of the burden of simple problems. Reward? 

Faster and engaged customer service = Improved retention= Better Sales.

Final Thoughts

To conclude, agent experience matters as it’s the foundation of the brand’s relationship with an individual — customer or employee. A holistic approach towards agent experience can ensure consistent growth and success.

Is your company looking to drive more productivity without compromising customer experiences? Verloop.io, the world’s smartest conversational support platform, can help you cut down costs and delight more customers.

In the past, Verloop.io has successfully automated customer support at scale for companies that value delightful support. The solutions offered to connect agent experience and customer experience.