5 Ways to improve contact center agent satisfaction | #customersupport #supporticket

Highlights:

• Employee satisfaction has a huge impact on contact center operations
• Satisfied agents perform better, create a better customer experience, and have lower turnover
• There are multiple ways to improve agent satisfaction in contact centers

What is your contact center’s most valuable asset? Your most important asset is your agents.

Without your agents, your customers would have no one to turn to when they have questions. The largest expense for your contact center is likely the labor costs associated with your agents, so you want to utilize them to the fullest extent possible, but you also want to ensure that your agents are happy and productive. For these reasons, investing in the agent experience is critical to overall contact center success.

Employee satisfaction statistics

The following statistics offer surprising insights into employee satisfaction, and why it matters to organizations today:

Let’s look at some contact center-specific statistics on employee satisfaction:

• Satisfied contact center agents are significantly more likely to stay at their company; they’ll even refer a friend
• Agents who expect to stay at their job a year from now are almost twice as satisfied
• Highly-satisfied agents are more than three times as likely as their dissatisfied colleagues to feel empowered to solve customer issues
• 57 percent of agents who were able to reach their supervisor within a couple of minutes reported higher levels of employee satisfaction

Measuring employee satisfaction

There’s no one set formula for measuring employee satisfaction. You can measure employee satisfaction by:

• Surveying employees
• Utilizing the employee satisfaction index
• Using the Employee Net Promoter Score
• Holding one-on-one meetings
• Setting up a virtual employee suggestion box on your website or a dedicated app

Why measuring employee satisfaction matters for your contact center

Happy employees are linked to:

• Higher customer satisfaction
• Lower absenteeism
• Lower turnover

Poor customer satisfaction, high absenteeism, and high turnover all cost contact centers money. Investing in employee satisfaction yields dividends.

How can you improve contact center agent satisfaction?

There are several ways to improve agent satisfaction:

• Comprehensive training
• Giving agents access to the information they need
• Connecting employees to internal resources
• Coaching agents to improve performance
• Recognizing and rewarding good performance
• Creating healthy competition amongst agents or teams
• Letting agents work from home or on a flexible schedule

Comprehensive training

Without the right training, you can’t effectively help customers, and customers get upset with you. That’s why offering comprehensive training that covers as much subject matter as possible creates a better employee experience for agents; they’re more equipped to do their jobs.

Companies can even train employees remotely with the right software. Market-leading contact center software features video, telephony, and chat, so trainers can still work face-to-face with agents regardless of their physical location.

Giving agents access to the resources they need

Training is the first step to improved employee satisfaction. However, what happens when an agent actually starts working?

There are two things that companies can do to help agents succeed (and boost their satisfaction):

• Provide an internal knowledgebase
• Give them access to critical customer information

An internal knowledgebase serves as the home for policies and procedures that agents can access quickly. Let’s say they’re on a call with a customer, and the customer wants to know how to return an item that doesn’t follow normal return procedures. The knowledgebase would help the employee find the information to help the customer without wasting time.

Second, giving agents access to critical customer information helps them do their jobs better. Being able to look at data from a business application (such as a CRM) makes the interaction faster. For example, an agent will be able to see a customer’s history with the company during an interaction, so the agent will better understand how to solve an issue.

Connecting employees to internal resources

So, you’ve trained your employees. They can access a knowledgebase and business applications such as CRMs during customer interactions. What happens when they need to turn to someone else in the organization to fix a problem?

Connecting employees to internal resources is crucial. Agents can’t sit in a silo, without being connected to anyone else in the company. What if someone from another department is the only one who can solve a customer’s problem?

Best-of-breed contact center software allows agents to connect to their colleagues in other departments through chat, telephony, and video. Moreover, there’s an internal presence indicator which shows who is available to help.

By connecting to internal resources, agents have a better chance of solving customer problems, and feel better about their jobs.

Coaching agents to improve performance and recognizing good performance

No one likes wondering about how they’re doing at work. They want direct, honest, actionable feedback.

Monitoring agents gives managers greater insight into agent performance. Market-leading contact center software lets managers monitor on-screen and telephone interactions, so managers don’t miss anything.

The right contact center software gives managers the ability to coach agents through whisper coaching or barge-in functionality. Monitoring isn’t only about coaching, though; it can also be used to recognize stellar agents. Gallup research reveals that when employees receive recognition for a job well done, they’re more engaged and perform better.

Letting agents work from home

One way you can boost agent satisfaction is by letting agents work from home. Research from Pipkins shows that agents who work at home have an 80 percent retention rate, while those who work on-site have a 25 percent retention rate.

Agents no longer have to worry about long commutes or parking. They’re in a comfortable, familiar environment, which better positions them for success. Plus, by expanding to remote agents, contact centers can pull from a wider talent pool of the best agents vs. those who are able to commute into the contact center.

Improve contact center agent satisfaction with RingCentral

RingCentral’s flexible, robust contact center software runs in the cloud, enabling agents to work remotely while ensuring monitoring and coaching capabilities. To learn more, get a demo.