Reduce agent churn and improve agent satisfaction

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Increase agent efficiency with Bell's Web Impresario desktop solution
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6 steps to maximum value, maximum success: A technology roadmap for the customer experience
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Finding the root cause of customer dissatisfaction with speech analytics
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Could you improve the way you gather and use customer feedback across your organization?
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Contact centres invest a large portion of their budget into hiring, training and coaching agents – not to mention the significant investment required to fund performance incentives and salary costs. An essential part of running a successful contact centre is finding ways to retain agents so they can provide a return on your investment in them.

Here are some tips and suggestions to help you reduce agent churn and improve agent satisfaction in your contact centre:

Equip your agents with the right tools for the job – In many contact centres, agents need to work with multiple applications designed by different manufacturers to fulfill a customer request. This makes tasks unnecessarily complex and compromises agent productivity and customer service.

Agent desktop and CRM integration solutions increase agent productivity by consolidating the agent desktop to speed workflow and reduce the need for customers to repeat themselves.

Supply agents with high-value work – Contact centre agents do not enjoy tedious work. Self-serve applications provide contact centre customers with the ability to retrieve account information, place orders and complete market research surveys over the phone or on the Web – reducing the need for agents to fulfill routine inquiries.

If live agent assistance is required, self-serve applications can be used for customer authentication before the agent is contacted – cutting down the amount of tasks the agent needs to complete and reducing contact transaction time.

Ensure appropriate call flow – Many contact centre agents are assigned transactions that they have not been trained to handle. Sophisticated weighted skills-based routing eliminates mismatched transactions and ensures that the assigned agent can effectively assist the customer.

Offer employment flexibility – Many contact centres require shift work, making it extremely demanding to balance personal and family demands. Workforce management solutions provide contact centre agents with the ability to easily trade and reschedule their shifts with other similarly qualified agents. This ensures the contact centre has appropriately-qualified agents available to serve customers while offering employees the flexibility they need.

Consider providing agents with the flexibility that improves their work-life balance by allowing them to work from home. Virtualizing your contact centre allows agents from across the country to work from common queues and be measured against the same key performance indicators, ensuring that customer service is consistent regardless of where agents are.

Make use of technology such as the Impresario agent desktop from Bell to give contact centre agents anytime, any-place access to your contact centre platform. It also offers mobility for supervisors, empowering them to monitor the contact centre from any location.

Provide agents with supportive coaching and training – Contact centre agents inevitably face stressful situations – particularly when they handle transactions with unhappy customers. Providing agent and supervisor training prepares your agents and supervisors to deal with these situations and helps develop the skills and patience necessary to turn unhappy customers into satisfied customers.

Additionally, quality monitoring and recording solutions can be used as a workforce development tool by recording calls and reviewing how they were handled during coaching sessions. By supplementing coaching discussions with concrete examples of expertly handled transactions, as well as transactions that were handled poorly, employees receive specific examples of how they can improve their skills and performance.

Why Bell?

With Bell, you have access to the largest team of contact centre professionals in Canada. Our experts work to define, design, develop and deploy the appropriate solutions for your organization.

We constantly test new solutions in our own 310-BELL contact centres. We apply key learnings to the solutions we offer, giving you access to best practices, new technology trends and the most efficient processes.

To learn more, visit our contact centre solutions page and download our white paper Finding the root cause of customer dissatisfaction with speech analytics. Then contact your Bell representative to see how you can work towards reducing agent churn and increasing agent satisfaction.