Want to improve CX? Start with your agent experience

Your employees will always be your most visible brand advocates – what they do, say, and how they present plays a huge part in the way your brand and business is perceived by customers and prospective customers. And no more so than in the contact centre environment where your agents are, quite literally, delivering your customer experience.

But contact centres are often (for want of a better word) unloved. They are generally considered a cost centre, which means there’s a more regular drive to take cost out, rather than invest. And this can lead to businesses making rash decisions about their CX operations, CCaaS technologies, contact handling, and the role of AI.

Contact centres have also long presented a staff retention challenge. Recent figures suggest the average agent tenure in the UK is around 13 months, with in-house contact centres suffering a 19% staff turnover rate (BPO much higher). This drives up recruitment and onboarding costs for organisations, as replacing an agent costs approximately 16% of their gross annual earnings. In a mid-sized contact centre (500 seats) that’s upwards of £275k just in replacement costs every year!

Some of this turnover is probably unavoidable, as the service agent role is likely to attract people in transitory periods of their lives – for example when studying, just starting out, or a new parent. But some of the churn could be avoided by creating a better employee experience, where friction is minimised, the work is meaningful, and potential career paths are more visible.

At Acceleraate we are vocal advocates for the contact centre agent, as we believe the situations they encounter, and the skills they develop are extremely transferable into a variety of career paths.

The reasons agents leave

According to Gartner, the top causes of agent attrition are:

• Inadequate training

• Micromanagement

• Low wages

• No prospects

Let’s take each reason in isolation.

Inadequate training

Often exacerbated by poorly integrated technology, inadequate training is one of the top reasons for attrition, as cited by contact centre agents. We can’t help but find this quite surprising, as your agents are the people who are physically delivering the customer experience, and the people who are responsible for turning bad situations into good ones. From a customer perspective this can be the cause of huge frustration, and with 96% stating that a high effort experience would lead them to be disloyal to a brand, removing friction through more cohesive, personal, and meaningful interactions is essential.

Modern cloud technology supplemented by system integration can help here. If your agent onboarding and training programme is manual and difficult to deliver, an integrated UCaaS/CCaaS approach, with onboard agent coaching, customer data, and knowledge base integration would significantly reduce onboarding effort, and help to ensure that agents do not need to retain specific knowledge. This can dramatically improve the customer experience, leading to faster interactions, fewer calls being transferred, and improved first contact resolution.

Micromanagement

Whilst we should caveat that micromanagement isn’t necessarily something that we at Acceleraate have observed directly, we can understand why it might feel like this is the case in some contact centres. By its very nature the contact centre is a KPI-driven environment, often high pressure, and can be pretty relentless. Add in a big wallboard with visual red flags against individual performance metrics and you can see why some agents felt they were being micromanaged.

Some of the issue here is also likely linked to the inadequate training point – if agents aren’t properly trained, they will not feel empowered. And micromanaged is basically the opposite of empowered.

With modern CCaaS and AI technologies CX leaders can monitor and drive performance through coaching, rather than direct enforcement. Some of this can even be automated and surfaced as real time QA guidance – such as next best actions, agent sentiment detection, scripting, and summarisation.

Low Wages

Whilst over $800bn per year is spent by brands on advertising, it’s often the case that as little as possible is spent by companies on customer service. Fundamentally this is because marketing is considered an investment, whilst customer service is considered a cost.

But, for us, this doesn’t make sense. Customer service can be a profit exercise because effortless customer experience delivers loyalty; and loyalty delivers retention, repeat business, and reputation/referral.

We advocate for more contact centre operators adopting performance-related remuneration. With the right attribution technologies in place, service agents could be additionally rewarded for the part they play in important sales activities such as basket conversion, customer up-selling, renewals, and referrals. Not only does this give your agents the opportunity to earn more, which improves retention; it also motivates them to perform. It's a win-win.

Remember the £275k annual agent replacement costs from earlier in this article? Using the same metrics, that saving could translate to £550 per agent in performance-related commissions or additional benefits.

No prospects

Traditionally, contact centres have been somewhat transient environments with little to no career progression. Forward-thinking employers have been doing more in recent years to improve the agent experience through modern technology and better process, but there remains a huge (relatively untapped) opportunity to home-grow future talent directly from your customer service team.

By using smart technology, proper data, and AI to augment your staff, your contact centre agents are empowered to work on less mundane, more meaningful, and more valuable work. This provides fantastic opportunities for forward-thinking employers to improve career pathways for their contact centre agents.

Customer experience (CX) is a mirror of your employee experience (EX)

It’s true. If you are weak on one side, it’s highly likely you’re weak on the other. The challenge is often that the two are siloed, with EX managed by HR and CX managed by Customer Success. And this isn’t just about remuneration and benefits (although those are important), it’s about the extent to which your agents feel supported, empowered, and valued.

Of course, it stands to reason that if an employee is happy in their role, suitably challenged, comfortable within the culture, and appropriately remunerated they will stick around for longer. But they’ll also deliver a better customer experience. Think about this from your own perspective. I’m sure that virtually everybody has at some point been in a job they hated. Were you bouncing out of bed every morning? Were you prepared to go that extra mile for a customer? Did you live and breathe the company values? Probably not. It’s human nature, and it’s the same in your contact centre.

It's very easy to become entrenched in the processes, the 10-minute intervals, the daily AHTs (self-imposed KPIs), but that leaves virtually no time to focus-in on the people side. This leads to a merry-go-round of poor outcomes, missed targets, difficult conversations, and agent churn.

So, if you want to improve your customer experience, take a step back and have a look at your employee experience first. You might be surprised about what you find!

Acceleraate helps businesses to integrate CX & EX. We focus on removing friction and reducing effort with best-of-breed technology, using modern CCaaS and AI to augment and empower staff, helping you and your contact centre agents to build relationships that last.