Going from good to great is never easy. But, if an individual has a mix of talent and drive, there’s always a way.
Whether striving to reach personal goals or workplace objectives, the right tools often aid the process. Having someone provide feedback and motivation on your journey is also important.
But where do you start? How do you set goals if you don’t have accurate information?
You need to know where you are before you figure out where you want to end up.
Take running, for instance. Sure, you can buy the best shoes, but can you measure your performance? There’s the matter of balancing distance, speed, and frequency.
It all comes down to data, a central pillar in every field these days. And it’s no different in contact centers. Data is gold.
The Quest from Agent to Super-Agent
What can’t be measured can’t be improved. Data provides insights that can bring about transformative change.
In contact centres today, one of the biggest challenges is to harness the power of data and information. Data alone means nothing. But capturing data from recordings and transcripts and analysing it to uncover trends, gaps and opportunities drive better performance.
Harnessing such opportunities in the new world of hybrid and remote work offers more benefits than ever.
“The hybrid work arrangement means that there isn’t as much face time with supervisors,” said Megan Keup, Product Marketing Manager at CallMiner. “In some scenarios, agents are doing more self-coaching than ever. They need easy access to feedback, and they can’t get that unless they have the right tools.”
Investing in advanced tools like conversation analytics opens new insights for the agent and the management team, who have a personal stake in supporting and improving agent performance.
“Employee (agent) satisfaction drives deeper engagement,” continued Keup. “And happy agents means reduced churn.
Managers who focus on delivering data-driven feedback can have a real impact, renewing an agent’s passion and upping their desire to take it to the next level. Real breakthroughs can and do happen.
From Agent to Super-Agent: The Playbook
As mentioned, a contact centre lives and dies through the agents’ expertise and their emotional tenor. When call agents are at their best, it strengthens customer loyalty and presents opportunities to upsell and cross-sell.
Expertise develops in diverse ways. Agents need tools for faster training and onboarding. They also need immediate access to good and bad calls, which offer clues to improved performance. In a self-training session, an agent can listen to a call in her own words in a non-biased way. This information (like agent kudos) also helps the human resources team in merit reviews.
So, what tools does an agent need to become stronger, more efficient and more confident? What’s required is a comprehensive suite of capabilities. That could include omnichannel conversation ingestion and analysis, agent coaching and real-time alerts, visualisation tools, screen recording capabilities, and more.
Behind these capabilities also has to be advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technology. AI and ML is what truly takes a stream of voice and text data and turns it into conversation trends, insights and opportunities for action.
Today, thanks to innovation in AI, businesses are unearthing new insights from contact center conversations faster than ever, and gaining a unique federated repository of permission-based data for AI training.
Change is Constant
Not only are we living in interesting times, but the times are changing like never before. That means using the right mix of tools and support to improve contact centre interactions is the only way to meet the constantly changing demands of customers on the brands they interact with.
“The world has changed dramatically in the past two years,” said Keup. “No one expected it, especially the work setting (post-Covid).
“The right tools and technologies make it easier for frontline agents to achieve exceptional success in hybrid and remote settings.”
While change is constant, it doesn’t have to hold back a contact centre.
To learn more about how more intelligent, AI-powered coaching can improve the employee experience and transform the customer experience, download CallMiner’s Whitepaper ‘How to Coach Using AI-Powered Insights Across Your Multi-Generational Workforce.’
