CLOUD
CONTINUED
Hilary Oliver Chief Marketing and Customer Experience Officer
Maintaining Standards Given the people who they interact with, maintaining agents ability to provide a quality service whilst outside of a call centre will have been at the front of managers minds when making this transition. Out of sight does not necessarily mean out of mind, and not being able to see agents and how they are working can be a stressful experience for the team leaders responsible for them. However a key way to maintain standards, according to Oliver, is to set key performance indicators (KPI) for agents to measure their own success on. “Monitoring and measuring performance is critical, but with agents working remotely there is more reliance on systems for visibility, collaboration and access to information,” said Oliver. “As a result, agents are more empowered with access to more information than ever before. “Cloud-based solutions empower agents with the knowledge to improve their own performance, and visibility of how well they are achieving this, against personal, team and business KPIs. They can now effectively influence outcomes, and feed back information to improve processes, for example script optimisation or call scheduling. “New collaborative workspaces, empowered by analytics, enable supervisors to understand customer interactions, predict trends, and influence the performance of their agents, whilst agents on the front line have control over customer communications and access to performance views to ensure they can consistently deliver the best customer experience.”
This ability to mark their own homework leads to a more empowered workforce according to Chris Angus, Vice President of Commercial Sales within 8x8 for EMEA, which leads to more investment in the workforce. “When agents are more empowered and more successful, it’s easier for business owners to invest in these people’s development and careers,” said Angus. “The cloud contact centre is what really gives people the opportunity to do that, and ultimately the aim of the contact centre is to improve customer satisfaction, increase agent retention and increase operational efficiency. If you can tick those three boxes, every business owner is going to be laughing, and the cloud contact centre gives them the option to achieve this.” Agent satisfaction The old adage about doing what you love and not working a day in your life might not apply to customer service agents, but churn of these people can be an issue for call centres. The estimated recruitment fee for sourcing a single customer service agent is £3,158, while the average cost of agent turnover is estimated at £202,125 per year for a typical contact centre. It’s no wonder, as talking to people who can be impatient, angry and, frankly, rude from nine to five on top of the stress of paying rent, picking up the kids, and working out what’s for dinner must be exhausting. “If you think about the reasons why people leave businesses, a lot of the time it’s because these people don’t have the skills or the training to be successful in their role,” said
tollring.com
Monitoring and measuring performance is critical, but with agents working remotely there is more reliance on systems for visibility, collaboration and access to information.
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