Agents are the heart of your contact center. Investing contact center management effort into their experience will impact your customers.

A strong customer experience begins and ends with your agents. Investing time and energy into improving the work your agents do to support customers across their most common pain points will help drive consistently positive customer experiences. These benefits include:

Faster Support

Investing in the proactive management of your contact center will result in a more efficient operation over time. This means faster support for valuable customers in need of help, regardless of the channel they access your contact center through — call, chat, text, social media, or other channels. 

Strong Customer Experience

As your general operations improve, you’ll experience greater consistency across internal processes, scripts, and performance of key contact agents. This ensures that customers receive the help they need in a timely manner and have all needs met with the same level of quality regardless of who helps them.  

Improved Customer Loyalty

Strong customer experience, when experienced multiple times, deepens the relationship between customers and your brand. With every support request met and fulfilled, customers grow their trust in your company’s ability to follow through on its promise to deliver a quality product, service, and experience. 

Common Contact Center Management Challenges

Successful contact center management oftentimes requires revitalizing internal processes and investing in new approaches to customer services. 

Incomplete or Little Customer Data

If you haven’t been dedicating efforts to gathering customer data or investing in additional feedback tools, such as text analytics, to help gather data, then you probably struggle to find solutions for improvement. 

Without data, you won’t be able to truly pinpoint the areas where your customers have the most friction with your contact center model. Being able to pull in feedback and analyze it will drive concrete solutions and thus improvements.  

Ineffective Coaching or Training

Your agents are the ones who manage customer relations. Therefore, it is important to establish set goals and benchmarks that are consistent across the entire contact center team. Then, develop training and ongoing coaching centering on these common goals so ensure everyone is given the same opportunity to succeed.

Without a common goal and set of standards, agents will consistently deliver an inconsistent experience that is perceived as difficult by customers. 

Outdated Contact Center Model 

If you have a contact center that doesn’t deliver an agile experience for customers, you’ll find that removing friction from the customer experience is near impossible. 

Adopting an agile model can enhance the customer experience by eliminating channel silos that can otherwise make the process of getting support choppy and frustrating. 

How to Improve Agent Performance Through CX-Focused Contact Center Management

To improve customer experiences with your contact center, you should start with your agents.  Your contact center agents make up most of the experience that your customers have when they interact with your customer service center, yet agents are typically only measured on efficiency metrics like call time and first time final. 

Get Agents on the Same Page for Change

Before making significant changes to your contact center’s processes and procedures, develop a concrete plan of action that identifies three major components: 

• The key people involved
• The core aspects of your contact center’s mission
• Existing channels and how they can be integrated

When identifying the key people needed to execute a valuable contact center experience, map out each role from every channel. Additionally, identify your most common customer and set an intention for how your team ideally wants to serve them. This might be in alignment with a general mission statement. 

Next, identify the core aspects of your mission. This is the soul of your operation, and relates closely to culture. 

Lastly, map out every existing channel and process. Identify who owns what and pinpoint friction in the process or areas where processes can be combined. Assign roles for change, meaning who will lead the evolution of new processes or integration of channels. 

Implement an Agile Contact Center Management Model that Improves Experience for Agents and Customers

A multichannel model that invests in delivering quality customer experience begins with ensuring every point in the contact center is in alignment. 

This will not only improve CX but the employee experience as well. Focusing on realignment across internal teams will reduce agent attrition, contact volume, and time taken to solve a customer’s problem. In return it will improve: 

• Customer satisfaction
• Agent experience 
• Agent productivity and performance
• Drive change internally

A content center management model that prioritizes an agile approach ensures that all members of the center have access to the same information in order to deliver a seamless multichannel experience to customers. To do this, integrate signals and analytics. 

Leverage Text Analytics to Assess Gaps Between Agents and Customers

Gathering vital customer data via text analytics drives decision making and the evolution of your contact center. 

Text analytics has the ability to pull in mass amounts of text from customer conversations and engagements, and process this data to pull out key pain points and areas of friction in the customer experience. This feedback can identify gaps in processes or agent training, leading to stronger improvements long-term. 

Pillars for gathering customer experience feedback to fuel change and improve agent performance include; 

• Listening at scale
• Analyzing and predicting the next best move
• Taking the Right Actions
• Ensuring Accountability

Use Contact Center Benchmarks to Measure Agent Performance

Investing in improving the internal performance of contact center agents comes with a set of business benefits. These include: 

• Increased agent and customer loyalty
• Increased data insights and team transparency
• Increase productivity and effectiveness

Customize key business outcomes based on your contact center’s primary mission and purpose and use these as benchmarks to measure agent performance against. 

To increase agent loyalty, provide consistent and thorough feedback and training to motivate teams. Enhance efficiency and data by leveraging new data to uncover areas of improvement. 

Use Customer Experience Data to Focus Agent Training Efforts

Customer feedback tells companies where agents need to improve. With that information, companies can target their coaching efforts where it matters and eliminate irrelevant blanket training programs. Ultimately, this can lead to an agile contact center that delivers quality while improving customer trust in your company.  

Optimize call routing to give agents issues they can handle well

Medallia’s customer feedback surveys include built-in performance triggers that help companies immediately identify competency gaps that adversely affect performance—such as an agent who’s not up to speed on the latest product. Traditionally, identifying gaps was a slow process, sometimes taking days or weeks. Now companies can spot and handle the issues as they occur, rerouting calls in the interim. With this approach, underperforming agents don’t hurt the customer experience –rather, they get the training they need.

Raise agent accountability on every call

Lastly, hold agents accountable for each call they receive as motivation to deliver quality customer support each time. Holding agents accountable goes beyond reprimanding them when things go wrong. Encouraging ownership also requires management to hand over trust and provide valuable feedback that invests in growth. 

When agents are motivated and empowered, they are more likely to be engaged. This increased level of engagement leads to hitting KPIs. 

• Find new ways to recognize and reward agents.
• Align performance reviews with direct customer feedback.
• Switch from outdated training to modern QA approaches.
• Establish benchmarks and incorporate it into 1:1 coaching. 

Bring in a Contact Center Solution to Support Development

Contact center solutions, like Medallia, have the ability to enhance the customer experience of your contact center through a three part approach.

• Listen to customer feedback, and analyze signals and text.
• Analyze data to find solutions. 
• Create plans for solving customer pain points and hold agents accountable for carrying out new solutions with accuracy. 

Learn more about how Medallia’s contact center solution can turn your contact center into a customer loyalty generating hub.