The performance of your contact centre depends on the productivity of your agents.
When your team members feel empowered by the right support, tools and technology, they’re able to accomplish incredible things in any environment.
It’s now critical for business leaders to motivate and successfully manage their remote employees. Happier staff are more engaged and productive, and save businesses money not only in reduced overheads but also in lost business.
For contact centres to truly benefit from a ‘working from home’ workforce, they must learn how to guarantee better productivity. Here’s some basic advice to help with that.
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1. Provide Autonomy
As chatbots and artificial intelligence are introduced to deal with simpler queries, employees are free to handle a wider range of complex questions and challenges. Whether dealing with repetitive questions or complicated issues, agents will need some guidance from managers.
Make sure agents have the freedom to find their own way of working. Provide your employees with autonomy and they’ll reward you with new creative methods of problem-solving.
2. Ensure Easy Collaboration
Beyond customer communication, the connections between your employees is also crucial. It’s important to have the right tools in place that enable team members to collaborate with specialists for help on complicated tasks.
Staff who feel as though they have the support of their colleagues and supervisors to accomplish their goals will be more engaged and satisfied at work. Collaborative systems like RingCentral Contact Centre help keep employees connected and enable instant collaboration between colleagues to keep things running smoothly.
3. Omnichannel Engagement
Enabling agents to meet expectations should be a given for all contact centres. In today’s hyper-connected world, customer expectations are higher than ever. Customers use an average of seven different channels to connect with brands – and patience runs out quickly.
The only way to keep on top of that demand is to adopt an omni-digital customer engagement strategy, enabled by an aggregation platform that unifies all your customer conversations. Equip your agents with the right tools, and they’ll be able to cut response times and increase first contact resolution rates.
4. Analytics & Reporting
It’s crucial to have proper visibility into the engagement levels and productivity of your workforce. Workforce optimisation tools are helpful for this, and using real-time monitoring can give you the instant feedback you need to be fully responsive to any issues that crop up.
Use immediate reporting via dashboards to monitor your agents’ performance and use call logs, reports, and call recording to track the quality of customer interactions.
Empower your Team
In an era where customer experience is king, contact centre agents are the key to transforming client relationships. Happy and engaged employees will deliver a better bottom line for your brand, and a more satisfied customer base too. Empowered by the right productivity apps, employees can streamline their workload and get the information they need to deliver first contact resolution. By meeting ever-increasing customer expectations, contact centre agents can set a brand apart in the marketplace.
Originally published May 15, 2020, updated Jan 16, 2023
