Pain points are specific problems within your user journey that can negatively affect the overall experience. Removing or mitigating these pain points can create a seamless interaction that has multiple positive flow on effects for your business. In this series, we are focusing on the most common pain points experienced by customers, by contact centre agents, and by businesses as a whole, and exploring the best ways to remove these issues and improve your outcomes.
In our last post, we considered the main pain points that impact customers in the contact centre experience and the technology and solutions that can be used to address these issues.
In this post, we are focussing on pain points for your customer service or contact centre agents, and how your business can ease or remove these to enhance the performance of the team. Agent-centred pain points can result in employee frustration and burnout, loss of productivity, difficulty retaining staff, and ultimately losses to revenue and profitability. As a result, it is vital that businesses are actively considering their potential pain points and working to address them, so that they maintain an active and engaged workforce.
Difficulty Using The System During Busy Periods
Customer service agents need to be able to quickly and efficiently use their internal systems to assist customers with their problems and enquiries. Customer service systems that are clunky and take too long to use will inhibit live agents doing their job during busy periods, leading to customer frustration and the potential for customers to be more difficult to deal with. This can result in unhappy and annoyed live agents.
When choosing contact centre technology, involve users in the decision-making so you can find a solution that works well for them. Ensure there is adequate training and support so that your agents can be familiar with the system and confident when using it.
Difficult Customer Engagement
Agents often encounter challenging or irate customers who may be upset or frustrated. Handling such interactions can be emotionally draining. Technology can provide agents with access to comprehensive customer profiles and interaction history. This information allows agents to understand the customer’s previous interactions, preferences, and issues, enabling them to provide more personalised and effective support.
Lack Of Triaging
In a successful customer service centre, customer problems will be triaged based on their type and severity so that subject matter experts can assist customers to solve specific and complex issues in an efficient way. A lack of triaging ability – or a system that forces customer service agents to work on problems they are not equipped to deal with, without the ability to smoothly pass the customer on to a more knowledgeable colleague – is a pain point that can be addressed with smart customer centre solutions.
Difficulty Finding Information
If an agent can’t quickly and easily find stored information about a customer, it can will result in frustration for live agents and irritation for the customer. This is especially true if an agent is forced to ask customers for information that they have already provided.
When choosing a customer service system, ensure that it stores information about customers in a way that makes it easy for live agents to find key details, such as their purchasing history, relevant personal information, previous contact with customer service, and more.
Interoperability
Timely access to information is critical for any contact centre agent. As such, when systems fail to talk to one another, agents can experience frustration, as well as reduced productivity. This makes the seamless integration of contact centre technology with a company’s existing technology stack essential to an agent’s experience.
Interoperability ensure that various systems and applications can communicate with another, and share data effectively. It enables agents to access customer information, call history, and relevant data from various sources in real-time. As a result, agents are much better placed to provide more personalised and efficient customer service.
When technologies integrate seamlessly, agents are no longer requried switch between multiple systems or applications. This streamlines their workflow, saves time, and minimises the chances of errors or data duplication. Interoperability gives agents a holistic view of customer interactions across multiple channels. This empowers agents to provide consistent and personalised support, armed with ready access to relevant information from previous interactions, regardless of the communication channel used by the customer.
Lack Of Opportunities For Learning
Regardless of your job, most people want to continuously grow, learn and be stimulated at work. When live agents feel their work has become boring and monotonous, and they don’t have the opportunity to improve their skills and knowledge or try something new, they are likely to become apathetic towards their role.
A great customer service system will include opportunities for professional development, such as the ability to record successful interactions between customers and live agents. This can be used for training and self-reflection.
Conclusion
Leveraging technology and the right training, empowers contact centre agents with the tools and resources needed to effectively handle difficult customers, enhance customer satisfaction, and improve overall contact centre performance. Eliminating the agents pain points will elevate the customer experience.