Productive Agents, Happy Customers

NICE CXone’s built-in enhancements drive a great experience for all

3
Sponsored Post
Productive agents, happy customers
WFOInsights

Published: July 15, 2021

Maya Middlemiss

Maya Middlemiss

The role of the contact centre agent has evolved considerably in recent years with the rise of automation and self-serve technologies abstracting away many enquiries, to leave the most complex and nuanced interactions in the hands of an increasingly specialized workforce.

Lauren Comer, Principal Product Marketing Manager at NICE
Lauren Comer

Ensuring those agents are engaged and supported while working efficiently and productively is an essential balancing act for contact centre management, wherever people are working — as Lauren Comer, Principal Product Marketing Manager at NICE, explained:

“It’s about ensuring your agents are as productive as possible, without burning them out. It’s easy to be driven by a continual push for improved metrics, but you have to consider the human component.”

Respecting agent time and commitment

Such as, making sure you play fair when circumstances change — like a lower-than-anticipated call volume. Rather than sending an agent home/offline involuntarily, you can plan ahead to make better use of the slack time:

“We often hear sales and support teams saying, oh, we don’t have time for training…,” Comer continued. “But we can leverage unexpected downtime to develop agent skills, and bring their proficiencies to the next level.”

By embedding workforce engagement tools like learning and coaching materials right into the call handling interface, agents can access timely and relevant training between calls, turning idle time into productive professional development, while remaining in a ready/available state to take calls.

“When a contact comes in, the coaching window just seamlessly goes to the side”, Comer explained, “and keeps their place marked where they were. Then, when they’re done with that customer, they can pick up exactly where they left off, with their coaching package or quality evaluation.”

Productive use of the entire shift

This is a really big deal, because by smartly interweaving learning experiences in this way, agents can continually enhance their skills and develop themselves — which helps customers, and improves all the important metrics for success.

The important thing is having the right information available, to really make the most of those little slices of time as they occur. “One of the biggest differentiators in terms of agent and contact centre productivity is having a truly unified agent interface.

“Many contact centre vendors offer integrations for workforce engagement functions, but they’re essentially non-native and third party. They require flipping between screens and apps, and data feeds which can easily break, and lead to wasted clicks and time searching and logging in and out.” Comer added.

Instead, what NICE CXone provides is a true holistic digital workspace for CX agents — an increasingly essential environment in 2021, when the physical workspace could be anywhere.

Entering the online call centre

 “With CXone, when an agent logs in for the day, right from that agent interface, they can access their schedule for the day, other workforce management capabilities, evaluations, coaching packages, performance management dashboards, and gamification tools. It’s all right in that interface, they don’t have to navigate away to any other places, or log into different systems and browsers,” Comer concluded.

Minimising those clicks really boosts agent productivity, and drives intrinsic motivation and professional development, for the people dealing face to face with the most important stakeholders of all: the end customer. And that’s a win-win for those customers, the people supporting them, and the enterprise they’re working for.

Watch this demo to discover how CXone empowers agents, supervisors, and admins to drive efficiency and deliver exceptional customer experiences with a total solution suite

 

 

User ExperienceWorkforce ManagementWorkforce Optimization
Featured

Share This Post