Agent Development Redefined: Seven Challenges To Consider
1 Nov, 2004
By: Mariann McDonagh“This human factor, personal loyalty, is powerful. Brand loyalty often pales by comparison.”
Frederick Reichheld in The Loyalty Effect
“Of course, the goal of training employees is gaining competitive advantage.”
Peppers & Rogers
The past few years have witnessed an increasingly strategic role for the contact center. And as companies seek to transform their contact centers from cost centers into revenue centers, they expand their focus to include a better understanding of customer wants and needs.
Today, contact center performance is measured not only by how efficiently it addresses customer inquiries, but also by how effectively it leverages customer value. As a result, we are seeing a renewed focus on agent performance in an increasingly regulated and competitive marketplace.
Companies today are increasingly using an approach to agent development that leverages the actionable intelligence in contact center interactions to build stronger skills and create more proficient and loyal employees. This approach can help companies align agent performance with strategic business goals to forge stronger customer relationships and generate greater customer value.
These companies realize that thousands or sometimes hundreds of thousands of customer interactions take place daily in their contact centers. Each of these interactions represents an opportunity for them to better understand the complex relationship between their business and their customers. Customer data captured in contact center recordings can yield essential intelligence for optimizing performance, building customer loyalty, and enhancing customer retention.
Using customer intelligence analytics, these companies can more accurately assess agent performance as it relates to the quality of the customer experience. Analytics also equip companies to more rapidly address strategic business issues, including customer churn and process breakdown, by fine-tuning the role their agents play in their success.
Agents on the Front Line
Forward-thinking companies recognize that agent performance isn’t just about keeping calls short and minimizing cost. It’s also about generating revenue by closing sales, up-selling and cross-selling. More importantly, the quality of the experience that customers receive from the call center agents—the actual “face of the company”—reflects on the overall quality perception of the company by the customer. Enterprise Quality takes a holistic view of agent performance, customer experience and business process.
Agent evaluation is an integral part of a quality program that results in improved agent performance. Because agents are the main expense of a contact center, finding ways to lower operating costs, increase agent satisfaction and reduce agent turnover can directly impact the organization’s bottom line.
Challenges to Agent Development
Today, contact centers must address rapidly changing regulatory, competitive and economic challenges. Training and development programs should provide agents with up-to-the-minute skills for navigating this new customer service landscape. And they should empower contact center management to gauge agent progress and determine how best to promote continuous improvement.
Contact center technology should provide actionable intelligence—the timely information that agents and management need to perform effectively and deliver a high-quality, high-value customer experience. Here are seven challenges to consider in developing actionable intelligence for a smarter workforce.
Customer service as a competitive differentiator. The global marketplace has commoditized many industries, and quality of service has become a key competitive differentiator. For most consumers, past service experiences are instrumental in future purchase decisions. In fact, research has shown that good customer service in resolving product problems is more likely to result in future product purchases than products with no problems at all.
To ensure the consistent quality of service that makes customers want to come back for more, agent development initiatives should add value to formal training programs. Agent development programs should empower management to evaluate agent strengths and deficiencies and then deliver training targeted to individual agent needs. They should deliver best practices to agents, so that they can learn by example. And they should automatically alert management, in real time, when critical service issues require rapid intervention.
The increasing complexity of personal interactions. As the technologies used by contact centers becomes increasingly complex—and as self-service platforms become the arena for simpler, lower-value customer transactions—agents need to develop more sophisticated skills for using new systems and managing complex, higher value interactions.
To help agents keep pace with these challenges, agent development programs should deliver just-in-time training on timely topics, such as CRM and business systems, new products and up-sell campaigns, relationship management and call handling protocols.
The cost of non-compliance. Contact centers are faced with a growing volume of regulations, from the USA PATRIOT Act, HIPAA, DNC and Sarbanes-Oxley to Canada’s PIPEDA and the UK Data Protection Act. The cost of non-compliance is high, exacting heavy fines and potentially damaging the company’s reputation.
To ensure that agents understand and comply with regulatory requirements, agent development solutions should enable management to evaluate contacts for compliance and provide agents with additional training as soon as the need is identified.
The virtual contact center. For many contact centers, home-based agents are a source of greater productivity and significantly lower costs. Keeping home-based agents up to date on new policies, products and programs is truly a challenge, but it is critical to realizing the rewards of the virtual contact center.
Agent development programs should electronically “push” training materials to agents, providing staff throughout the enterprise with the training they need and aligning agent performance with enterprise goals.
The growth of outsourced/offshore operations. Contact center outsourcing delivers greater economies of scale than many companies can achieve on their own. Today, outsourcing is taking on global proportions, as companies seek to leverage lower wages in other countries. However, quality is often a red flag for outsourced/offshore operations, as knowledge gaps and cultural and language differences threaten to derail quality initiatives. And, as with virtual contact centers, ensuring that agents are knowledgeable about products and programs can be especially challenging.
To help reap outsourcing benefits while reducing the risks, agent development programs should enable evaluations and targeted training wherever agents are located, from single-site contact centers to multi-site, outsourced, and off-shore locations.
The impact of agent attrition. The cost of agent attrition continues to rise, as contact centers scramble to fill open seats. Today, the recruitment and training of a single new agent averages $6,400But, agent attrition affects more than staffing costs: frequent staff turnover and the presence of inexperienced employees are bound to impact customer satisfaction Conversely, motivated, proficient agents are more likely to produce satisfied, loyal customers who continue to purchase from the company with which they have a long-term relationship.
Agent development initiatives should enable agents to participate in decisions about the skills enhancement process, engaging them in feedback and enlisting them in the process of becoming more successful.
The imperative to lower costs and drive growth. Many e-learning programs of the past decade required a significant investment of time, training and money to implement, often adding significant costs and delivering little ROI. Plus, formal classroom training programs may not be able to keep pace with rapidly emerging business challenges, and supervisors may lack the time to coach agents when coaching is needed most.
Agent development programs should operate seamlessly within the scope of contact center quality programs for greater effectiveness and lower cost of ownership. They should provide training without diminishing contact center productivity or requiring costly e-learning delivery systems. They should be sufficiently agile to address changing market demands. And they should deliver value that can be monitored and measured.
Next Steps: Evolving Success beyond Agent Performance
Today’s quality requirements are becoming focused on more than scoring agents, because agents are only one side of the agent-customer interaction. An efficient agent reduces cost, but an effective agent also drives revenue. Quality, then, isn’t just about reduced talk-time. It is about replicating the best practices of the most effective agents to ultimately improve the experience that each customer takes away from interactions with the company.
In its most direct sense, defining a positive customer experience is about identifying problem calls when there’s still time to do something about the issues—to make things right again with an important customer who was transferred too many times or on hold for too long, to make a special offer to a customer who is in the process of closing an account, to react to a competitor’s campaign that is hurting business, etc.
A contact center that has the automated infrastructure to identify these contacts and issues and get them to the right people at the right time can begin to achieve a business-impacting level of quality that goes far beyond improving agent politeness scores by a particular percentage.
The final result is finding the perfect balance between people and process that will consistently deliver a positive, branded customer experience. Only by identifying actionable business intelligence for continuous improvement, optimizing business processes and achieving a branded customer experience can companies achieve the strategic ROI on their contact center investment.
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Seven Challenges to Agent Development
Contact center technology should provide actionable intelligence—the timely information that agents and management need to perform effectively and deliver a high-quality, high-value customer experience. Here are seven challenges to consider in developing actionable intelligence for a smarter workforce.
- Customer service as a competitive differentiator
- The increasing complexity of personal interactions
- The cost of non-compliance
- The virtual contact center
- The growth of outsourced/offshore operations
- The impact of agent attrition
- The imperative to lower costs and drive growth
