Nearly nine in 10 companies have formal, funded initiatives to improve their customer experience (CX). That’s because even a temporary lack of focus on CX could result in a swift dive in customer ratings, leaving the company vulnerable to competitors sweeping in and snatching valuable customers.
There is no shortage of recommendations on how companies can improve CX—implementing new tools, hiring different leaders, and changing operational processes to name a few. Establishing a solid CX improvement strategy requires a holistic look at the problems and solutions—and an acknowledgement that the strategy will evolve month by month.
One constant, however, is investment in the people serving customers. Analysis from Nemertes’ 2019-20 Intelligent Customer Engagement research provides compelling data, when companies focus on the agent experience, CX improves, without fail.
Solutions for Agents to Solve CX Problems
The top goal for smart CX leaders and contact center agents is to deliver stellar customer service. Unfortunately, many organizations are making that difficult to accomplish because agents don’t have a unified desktop, along with the right tools to provide analytics, performance metrics, and context. Specific issues include the following:
- Agents lack tools they need to accomplish their goals. For example, agent analytics, sentiment analysis, and predictive analytics can provide valuable information to help agents improve their own performance, as well as personalize and speed up service for each customer with whom they interact.
- The desktop interface is often a mess. Efficient agents have a unified desktop, eliminating the need to toggle back and forth between multiple applications. Such toggling extends the amount of idle time on each call as agents search for information—frustrating customers who simply want their problems resolved quickly.
- Supervisors are not spending time on training. Like any conscientious employee, contact center agents want feedback on their performance and goals for improvement. Supervisors and agents require better tools that can provide that feedback regularly to make a quick impact on customer ratings.
- Each interaction does not contain enough contextual data. Whether it’s a voice call, video interaction, or live chat, the lack of contextual, historical, predictive information prevents agents from delivering that stellar CX.
In the end, the lack of tools to effectively equip agents will result in poor First Call Resolution (FCR), longer Call Handle Times (CHT), and ultimately low CX ratings.
Driving to Perfection
Fortunately, there are solutions and strategies that can address the aforementioned issues. Nemertes conducted research to study what successful companies did to improve their CX, with real-world, quantitative metrics that document their results.
Join NICE product marketing director Gayathri (G3) Krishnamurthy and me for a webinar on March 10 at 1pm CT.
You’ll learn about how you can give agents the right tools to create an innovative agent experience that can transform customer experience. Indeed, agent success ultimately equates to customer success.
Register for the webinar here.
