Workforce Management Featured Article
How to Hire Great Agents & Keep Improving Their Performance
What makes for a successful contact center agent?
The answer will, of course, vary based on who you ask. But I would argue that agents need many of the same skills and characteristics as most other employees.
They should be calm, caring, and conscientious. They should be confident, so they have the grit to get the job done and inspire trust in their coworkers and the customers. They should be organized, so they can multitask and know how to prioritize what they need to get done. They should have the talent and training to do what they need to do. Experience isn’t mandatory, but it can be very helpful. Being able to take direction and learn from new input and information are also paramount.
Workforce optimization and speech analytics can help with that last part.
Contact centers can leverage real-time call analysis, or after-the-fact analytics that look a call recordings. That will help them better understand agent performance, word choice, compliance with scripts, tone, quiet periods, and how customers respond to all of the above.
That can help contact center managers get the information they need to reward and duplicate agent successes. It can enable them to offer targeted coaching to agents. In the process, those agents who are already caring, confident, conscientious, talented, and trained can get even better. And that makes the contact center better, customer satisfaction better, and your business better.
“Quite simply, speech analytics helps you deliver better service to consumers more efficiently,” writes Somos. “Specifically, speech analytics can help you train and curate your team of agents so that they are more consistently achieving performance benchmarks and improving customer satisfaction. It can help your strategy team gain a deeper understanding of customer behaviors, desires and pain points. And it can provide valuable insight into customer journey analytics, helping you understand and improve the customer experience like never before.”