5 ways to boost agent productivity

Productivity

Ways to improve agent productivity.

A contact center’s proper functioning and success depends on agents owing to the endeavors they put in. Agents are best known for providing quality service and solving customer queries and issues. Therefore, in order to assist them in being able to execute their work efficiently, contact centers use CIM technologies.These technologies are often feature rich and allow smooth operation. However, apart from using CIM technologies, you may also follow a lot of strategies which will not only empower the agents to assist customers but also enhance their productivity.

Lets have a look at some of these ways:

a. Decide projects and fix deadlines: Prioritizing activities and scheduling them on a daily basis is a good way to start. Once, the routine is decided, fix a deadline and inform your agents about it. This will help them work accordingly and turn out work within the stipulated time. Another way you could help agents boost productivity could be through a call back schedule. The application helps agents trace customers who have called them but could not get connected to them due to their unavailability. Once they are available, the tool initiates the call according to the time provided by the caller. The agent is then able to assist the customer basis the message dropped by the latter.

b. Route calls to the right agents: Customers do not want to get stuck with agents who take time to understand their problem and offer delayed solution to the same. Hence, make sure that your customers calls are getting routed to the right agents. You may use personal agent routing which ensures that customers are provided with consistently high quality of service from every interaction. The time spent in diagnosing the issue by the agent is minimized and this leads to a faster query resolution and much lower Average Handling Time. The solution is aimed at support processes for contact centers and enterprises that require a technology to enhance customer satisfaction and experience.

c. Make your agents feel comfortable: Contact centers should have an environment that lightens agents tension and makes them feel stress free. We know it very well that an agent spends the entire hour of his time at work by attending or making calls with a computer in front. This is enough to get him exhausted due to which he may not be able to perform well. You may therefore deploy tools which will automate their daily tasks. An IVR system for example will liberate the agent from regurgitating the same welcome speech for customers. It will play automatically once the number is dialed.

d. Quality monitoring: Agents who do not perform well require a proper training and monitoring. Till the time they do not get a proper hold of the process and its work, they will definitely not yield good result. This will lead to low productivity. To enhance their productivity and performance, tools like quality monitoring could be used. The tool will empower you to conduct monitoring, gauge at agent performance and minimize errors.

e. Offer adequate training: There is a huge loss of time owing to agents repeatedly asking questions to customers on calls and taking time to understand. This could be possible if your agent is not properly trained. Therefore, make sure you have the best resources to train and support them in their work. You may do this by hiring an external training consultant and conduct exercises post the training. Once your agents assure you of good performance, there will be an obvious increase in their productivity which will undoubtedly be conducive to your business.

f. Create FAQs: FAQs are Frequently Asked Questions wherein customers find answers to their frequent queries. In this section, there are lots of questions posted by customers and are more or less common to one another. The FAQ repository thereafter can be connected with your company CRM which will make it easy for all agents to work efficiently. Therefore, instead of customers calling the agents for queries, they can visit the FAQ section and find solution. This will help agents concentrate on the other customer complaints which might be difficult to answer instantly and require their undivided attention.

So, are you practicing these steps to boost your agents productivity?