While chat-bots, self-service, and community answers are key tools in your customer care playbook, the collective experiences of your agent team aren’t something to overlook. On the surface, improved agent experience may include one or two things listed above. However, pairing some out-of-the-box thinking and the wide range of capabilities found within Khoros can make the difference in your digital contact center.
In the past, it was commonplace to have your care center on the second floor of your main office building. In those days, it was easy to get your finger on the pulse of your agents’ experiences and performance. All that was required was to walk into your call center and ask your managers. Today, your agent’s office has turned into bedrooms, kitchen tables, different floors of your headquarters, and for the larger brands out there, different nations.
Working Remotely has changed everything and we as brands have to change with it. This isn’t to say that WFH is detrimental to customer satisfaction or agent performance. The rise of WFH environments has been a broadly positive shift in the workforce according to a study done in the Department of Psychiatry at Tokyo Medical University. To quote the study directly,
“The multivariate logistic regression analysis demonstrated that remote work was associated with the reduction of psychological and physical stress responses independently of changes of job stressors, social support, sleep disturbance, and total sleep time on workdays.”
While this is a key indicator of a more positive experience for those who work remotely, it has presented an interesting challenge for brands. With our teams now spread out across the country or the globe, we need to understand how our teams are performing and what we can do to improve their in-app experience.
While your specific KPIs may differ widely depending on your brand, your agent experience should always be included in your list. The simple truth is that happy agents make for satisfied customers, which in turn, creates an overall more positive customer experience. Regardless of your team’s size, a primary factor in improving your customer’s experience is understanding not only how your agents are performing but also ensuring that they have the right tools to serve their customers in the best way possible for your brand and customer care goals.
Like any tool, Khoros’ Care Platform can best serve your brand when it is implemented to its full potential. Let’s take a look at the seemingly unconventional methods that Khoros can help your agents across the board.
A foundational step to modernizing, the ability to recognize and understand what your team needs to perform at peak levels is wholly dependent on your analytics. Without clear data, you may find yourself struggling to make meaningful changes or better design your care strategy.
Alongside your monthly key reports, a best practice would be to run an Agent performance report. What exactly this means for your customer care team will, of course, differ on your KPIs, care strategy, and chosen industry. However, you should consider the following metrics and how they fit into your care system.
- Average Response Handle Time
- Total Inactive Time
- In-Focus Inactive Time
- Out-of-Focus Inactive Time
For more information about how to fit these concepts into your care strategy, take a look at this step-by-step series exploring Modernizing Digital through Care Analysis, Optimization and Growth.
Improving both Customer and Agent experience is simplest with the addition of Automation. Skip headaches on both parties by providing customers with an easy way to get answers prior to routing to your agents. For agents, it can be integrated with your KB to provide instructions to internal-only information that can help customers resolve their issues.
Our Agent Assist feature reduces the time to handle customer inquiries, deliver accurate resolutions, and even the time needed to train new agents. Powered by Natural Language Processing (NLP), Agent Assist delivers agents real-time recommendations for troubleshooting Guides and Community Knowledge articles. Combining Agent Assist, our current automation systems, Welcome Responses, and even the simple act of listing Business hours can equal up to a significantly improved CST/NPS.
In the case that you have an active and flourishing Community, directing your customers' support requests to your Community is the best solution for both your agents and your customers.
It’s a way to connect with your customers while providing practical ways to find their answers. Give your customers the accurate responses they want while opening up more opportunities for customer satisfaction, loyalty, and positive “voice of the customer” feedback.
Best Practices
- Utilize your Community’s super users with self service and off-loading Q&A’s to decrease the workload for your Community managers and agents.
- Allow peer to peer responses and enable super users to provide answers.
- Meet your top KPIs by increasing engagement & resolution rates, improve your CSAT/NPS, reduce cost per contact, and improve agent performance(link to Atlas Agent Performance).
Time is money and the less time your agents spend getting your customers the answers they need improves your NPS for more than just your quarterly metrics. Suggested responses cut down on the repeated questions bottlenecking your agents' contact channels.
Best Practices
- Provide agents with repeatable answers that they can easily access and provide to customers, easily cutting down their handle time and TAR. (TAR is a customer experience metric link to TAR in Atlas)
- Meet these following KPIs: % of SLAs, Deflection/Containment, AHT, TAR, Cost per contact & Agent performance. Resolution Rate
Welcome responses built into your initial contact system can provide a big relief to your agent to increase the amount of call deflection in one fell swoop.
Best Practices
- Setting expectations on time to respond
- Ask preliminary questions and even refer to Self Serve
- Main KPIs: Improve TAR , CSAT/NPS, Handle time, % of SLA and initial incoming engagement.
While at first this can seem like a complex puzzle of various systems, by putting all of this together you will rapidly see a happier, more efficient team emerge that are more equipped to meet your brand’s SLAs and improve your CX overall.
As always, if you have questions or would like to chat live, shoot me a PM @A11ey.
I would love to discuss your ideas on how you are modernizing your Digital Care!
If you are interested in best practices for your Care or Community programs,
check out the other blogs in the Modernizing Digital Care Series.
