Challenges/Pain Points of a Contact Center Agent
Challenges:
Frequent context switching:
Switching screens frequently, alt-tabbing, copying and pasting content from one window to another, makes the process slow and prone to errors.
Example: An agent, David, is supposed to solve a customer's billing issue. David needs his softphone, the CRM to see the history, the billing system to check their account details, and a separate Knowledge Base for quick answers. He's constantly alt-tabbing, copyingDavid is dealing with a complex customer query. He’d like to be assisted and trained to handle those queries so that every time such a query is received, a consistent customer experience can be delivered with similar answers to the same questions that were asked in the past. To reduce handling times, David needs to have access to any tools tha he can use to
A Balance between the Average Handle Time (AHT) and First Contact Resolution (FCR)
While dealing with customer queries, David needs to keep the average handling time low, but at the same time, he also needs to make sure that the customer’s concerns are addressed in the initial contact, achieving high FCR. However, both of these metrics are contrary to each other. David needs some tools that can help him balance between those two metrics.
Siloed Customer Journey - lack of unified customer experience across channels
In the absence of a unified customer history, the customer has to repeat their problem again and again. While he might already be frustrated with the problem being faced, this leads to increased customer frustration and in the end, poor customer satisfaction scores
Dealing with upset, frustrated customers
While David is handling frustrated customers while being on the front line, he needs to know about the real-time sentiment of the customer during a conversation, to adapt and adjust his tone or approach to resolve the customer’s query.
Since David is receiving direct customer feedback, he needs to have access to the tools which he can use to record the customer feedback and take actions such as forwarding their concerns to the relevant departments or, needs to de-escalating, such as by creating a ticket, or sending the query to the supervisor.
Reduce after-call work time: David needs to wrap up a conversation by giving some wrap-up reasons and adding some wrap-up notes for his managers to review later on. The process of wrapping up a conversation takes some time which leads to increased conversation handling time and impacts the overall agent performance.
Ineffective CRM integration - In the absence of a well-integrated system, David is not able to see the complete picture of the customer journey and hence, might not be able to give the right aswer.
Clunky User Interface (UI)
While using a poorly-designed user interface, David will have to spend alot of time, looking for the right options and will need to do multiple clicks to perform a single operation. This results in user’s time wastage.
To keep him going, David needs to know the realtime statistics of his today’s work while also looking at the other team members' performance to motivate him to perform better
The agent needs to continuously monitor the individual insights, such as AHT and FCR, so that the agent can keep it optimal.