Improving the Customer Experience Begins With Improving the Agent Experience

The contact center, like any other business function, is prone to trends and even (dare one say?) fads. While the last decade was all about customer relationship management, this decade seems to be all about customer experience management. Customers today want fast, easy service and they want the right agent to provide them with the correct answer or resolution over whatever channel they choose. Customer loyalty is low for organizations that fail to provide a great customer experience.

As customers’ expectations have been on the rise, so too has the complexity of the organization and the number of communications channels customers can choose from. For this reason, wrote Monet Software CEO Chuck Ciarlo in a recent blog post, companies need to seriously think about expanding their support presence.

“The Internet has acclimated customers to getting the information they want when they want it, whether that’s a Sunday afternoon or at 2 in the morning,” wrote Ciarlo. “They also prefer other options besides picking up the phone (though that one remains the most popular and is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future). Companies that do not yet provide multichannel (and mobile friendly) support are falling behind the curve.”

While most experts would agree that providing an excellent customer experience is job number one, it’s not always easy to determine how to achieve this goal. It’s important to remember that at the root of every customer experience is a contact center agent. The customer’s journey is going to be only as swift and painless as this agent enables it to be. For this reason, say some contact center leaders, maybe we should be starting the task of improving the customer experience by improving the agent experience. This was a pervading theme at the recent Call Center Week 2015 event held in Las Vegas in mid-June, Ciarlo wrote.

“As one of the keys to improving the customer experience is improving the agent experience, there was much talk about how to support agents in the difficult job they have to do,” he wrote. “The most oft-proposed solution was giving them the technology they need to prosper.”

If the information agents need to answer questions and resolve issues is poorly organized, disparate, hard to find or error-filled, then agents will be handing out a lot of bad customer experiences. Agents are not robots, and high turnover means there are always a number of new workers sitting in seats. By making it easy for them to find answers and eliminating the roadblocks that lead to delays and errors, companies can begin seriously improving the customer experience. Cloud-based solutions can go a long way toward building an agent experience that is customizable, easy to use, up-to-date and logical, all while keeping costs down.

So if your organization is considering expending effort to begin a customer experience management improvement, perhaps it’s worthwhile to begin on your agent’s desktops. You may find there’s a lot you can do before you even need to spend very much capital. 

Edited by Stefania Viscusi