With an ever-increasingly competitive market and only 1% of contact centres planning to eliminate roles by 2022, the demand for high-quality customer experience (CX) agents is expected to remain a top priority in the contact centre industry.
However, the role of customer service representatives can be a difficult one for most workers, as evidenced by call centres’ high levels of employee turnover, which range from 30% to 45 percent on average.
Why are CX agents leaving companies?
According to reports, call centres are one of the most affected industries when it comes to elevated levels of employee stress, and as a result, the right technology and techniques are required to keep agents performing to the best of their abilities. Agents who feel supported in terms of both technology and a thriving work environment provide a higher level of customer service.
To help you strengthen your company’s contact centre strategy, we’ve outlined the following essential methods for attracting and retaining the best CX agents for your customer teams:
1. Leading Customer Experience Tech
One of the major draws for call centre agents is the measurement of your technology. Agents want customer experience management technology to enable a seamless consumer journey while also assisting them in their skill sets.
Identifying the tools that don’t function is a great place to start. If you switch technology providers, you could include existing employees in the decision-making process, earning support for a transformational project.
In today’s leading contact centres, customers are supported primarily through numerous communication channels, such as email, phone, live chat, social media, and possibly video chat. The key to this mix working successfully is the seamless integration of all channels through omnichannel communication.
A robust Omnichannel Customer Experience platform, such as Connex One, can provide seamless connectivity across multiple channels for a successful customer journey and experience, allowing both parties to pick up where they left off with minimal interruption..
With Omnichannel, agents feel powerful and equipped to deal with customer engagement because of the level of freedom and customisation available when engaging with customers. CX agents in an Omnichannel Contact Centre are more likely to remain productive and happy in their roles if they have faith in the technology at their disposal.
2. Creating a Fulfilling and Rewarding Role with Gamification
Incentivising salespeople with rewards has been a tactic that has successfully worked for over hundreds of years.
According to a study conducted by the Incentive Research Foundation, carefully constructed incentive programs can increase performance by as much as 44 percent. According to the findings, most businesses lack the knowledge or willingness to develop well-thought-out programmes that are strategically aligned with corporate goals.
Organisations in North America alone spend more than $115 billion on incentives. Gamification tools can be integrated into modern CX systems to help identify performance levels such areas of growth, progress, and concern.
At Connex One, we encourage our clients to make the most of our Gamification module, which allows CX team management to set goals for both teams and individual agents, rewarding productivity and excellence with incentives.
When agents believe they are adding value to the company, they are more motivated to continue excelling and staying engaged with their CX targets. Furthermore, as a manager, Gamification reports allow you to identify when agents are struggling or need additional training or support.
3. Intuitive and Inclusive Shift Management
Many contact centres utilise CX platform shift management features to monitor their employees’ shift patterns to ensure they are not working overtime or returning to tasks outside of their assigned shift times.
By allowing employees to view and manage their own shift patterns, WFM (Workforce Management) call centre solutions help to build an employee-focused culture while also improving retention and performance through optima Workforce Management processes.
Managers can also identify areas of potential increase in call volumes that will require more agents at specific times associated with live events by having an overall view of shift patterns. This enables them to schedule the right agents at the right time for specific campaigns, as well as agent 1:1s and mandatory training sessions outside of peak call times.
WFM solutions are not only aimed at managers or front-line agents. Multiple departments throughout the business can make use of the self-service holiday request feature embedded in platforms; with automated approval flows drastically reducing admin time within the workplace.
Creating your contact centre growth strategy
Connex One assists in attracting the best customer service agents for your company’s teams by providing innovative contact centre technology and management solutions.
To learn more about how Connex One is helping contact centre teams to succeed, get in touch with our team at hello@connexone.co.uk or request a free demo of our platform here.
