What is Agent Experience? (+Tips to Improve AX)
Approximately 96% of business leaders reported that focusing on agent experiences makes it easier to retain top talent. [1] That’s not all. An astounding 87% of business leaders also shared that prioritizing employee happiness will give them a competitive advantage.
Despite these findings, only 19% of companies have made agent experience their strategic priority. As a result, poor agent experience contributes to high turnover rates, especially for contact center agents.
But what does agent experience mean? How does agent experience impact customer experience? What are some tips and tricks to improve agent experience? Let’s find some answers.
What is agent experience?
Agent experience refers to the perception formed by the agents about the company. It considers factors like the workplace (processes, workflows, and environment) and the financial and mental well-being of agents to gauge the effectiveness and ease with which agents can do their day-to-day job.
Agent experience vs customer experience
The quality of agent experience is directly proportional to the quality of customer experience delivered. Research has found that happier agents are more informed, collaborate better internally, are more patient, and are more likely to offer better customer experiences. Like agent experience, customer experience is a customer’s perception of interaction with your company.
Typically, this improved relationship between customers and agents may be influenced by:
- the resolution shared by customer support agents
- the follow-up by customer service reps
- the ease of agent-customer interaction
- the customer satisfaction scores
Therefore, if you create quality agent experiences, your agents feel empowered to deliver superior customer experiences.
Let’s dive deeper into why businesses need to focus more on agent experience in 2022.
Why is agent experience important?
According to the Future of CX report, the new ‘want-it-now’ customer culture dictates the terms of customer service. The modern customers of 2022 have adapted to digital-first experiences using chatbots and online self-service tools to resolve basic queries. As a result, these customers have higher expectations from agents, such as proactive support, personalized communication, and effortless experiences across their preferred communication channels. In addition to this, agent roles have undergone a tremendous shift where they have to solve more complex problems and engage in high-value interactions across industries.
The good news is that McKinsey’s research shows that happy and engaged agents are 3.3 times more likely to feel empowered to resolve these issues [2]. That’s why it is important to prioritize agent experience like we personalize user journeys for seamless customer experiences.
According to McKinsey reports, agents are the happiest when they:
- believe in their company’s mission
- feel that they belong
- are given career opportunities
- have a manageable workload
Now that we understand the importance and factors contributing to agent experience, let’s discuss the 5 ways to improve agent experience.
How can you improve agent experience?
Since your agents have the maximum one-on-one interactions with your customers, you must create effortless experiences for your customers and agents alike. We have identified 5 ways that help you improve the agent experience.
1. Create a supportive work environment
Understand the needs of your agents to offer them the resources they need.
The opportunity: According to Salesforce reports, 54% of customers feel that different departments like sales, customer service, and marketing don’t share information among themselves.[3] This has been reported at a time when it’s crucial to provide connected experiences to ensure seamless customer journeys and eliminate the unnecessary burden on agents.
The solution: A supportive work environment helps agents feel heard, valued, and secure. Start by asking your customer service team about common customer needs and problems and the assistance they may need (training/ guides/ supervision) to deal with difficult customers. You can even ask your agents about the tasks or processes they found hard to manage or understand when they first started. Ensure you take notes of these gaps and include them as part of their training program.
You can further support your agents’ work by introducing a helpdesk software with a unified omnichannel dashboard that makes collaboration easier across teams. An ideal helpdesk software supports functionalities like parent-child ticketing, tagging other team members to relevant tickets, and access to customer history for complete context. This encourages a transparent flow of information and eventually boosts agent retention.
2. Elevate your employee experience
The opportunity: The New CX Mandate highlights that over 50% of customer service leaders worldwide feel that the mental health of their agents has been affected due to the pandemic. The agents had to manage rising query volumes and anxious customers and adapt to a remote work environment, resulting in higher churn. Online reviews have also revealed that poor employee experience worsens customer satisfaction.
The solution: You need to be able to manage your agents from anywhere with ease. Deploy a remote customer support software that enables your agents to collaborate across teams seamlessly, catering to customers from multiple time zones in their preferred language and providing faster resolutions.
3. Create an internal knowledge base
The opportunity: Your agents prefer self-service, just like your customers. With the ever-changing customer needs, questions may become more complex. A lack of self-service options like an internal knowledge base or an FAQ portal can lead to agent dissatisfaction and unnecessary wait times while agents try to connect with the right teams to find solutions.
The solution: Create an internal knowledge base so your agents can quickly find solutions to complex customer issues. An internal knowledge base also comes in handy during agent onboarding to help agents navigate their way through teams and processes.
4. Monitor agent experience metrics
The opportunity: Agent experience needs to be monitored from time to time using key metrics that determine how valued agents feel as support team members. You can further deep dive to understand if your agents are able to deliver to the best of their potential or if they need help. Per Cisco, 73% of contact center leaders reported agent turnover rate as one of the most significant problems for call centers. [4]
The solution: Develop a strong customer service department by training your agents and ensuring they have the tools they need to do the job well. Your training materials should serve as a complete guide for new hires, walking them through each stage of customer support. You may even organize periodic workshops for agents to help them hone their communication skills, enhance their knowledge about the products and company policies.
Managers can gather feedback from agents directly or leverage team dashboards to keep tabs on metrics that indicate agent performance and experience. Agent performance reports help you with the analytics managers can use to measure agent productivity and understand bottlenecks that affect them and hamper support efficiency so that agents can be individually assisted and trained to deliver at ease.
Get the Freshdesk guide for customer service training.
5. Empower your agents with the right software
The opportunity: According to the Forrester Opportunity Screenshot, approximately 38% of customers expect agents to know about them and have complete context of their query as soon as they connect. However, 23% of customer service decision-makers reported that agents do not have complete access to customers’ past interactions with their service channels.
The solution: Empower your agents using a workforce management software that helps you streamline workflows and automate tasks like ticket routing so tickets can be assigned to the right agents depending on their schedule, expertise, and workload. When you simplify tasks and make it easy for agents to do their job, they are more likely to deliver an excellent customer experience.
If you have a field team, you can deploy a field service management software that helps your agents and field technicians to be on the same page. Your technicians would be notified about a change in their schedule automatically and they can update the status of their service task directly from the field service mobile app.
Happy agents = Happy customers
Companies need to prioritize agent experience if they want to guarantee exceptional customer experiences. They can achieve this by creating a supportive workplace where employees feel like they’re part of a community that values them and acknowledges their efforts. The more engaged your employees are, the longer they tend to stay. As a result, you create a community of happy agents that deliver better service and grow your base of happier customers.
What are the ways you adopt to improve agent experience? Please let us know in the comments below.
