Category: Customer Experience

As much as we might get tired of overused buzzwords in the B2B sector, Customer Success is here to stay. Customer success representatives wear many hats: from onboarding to account management, and even customer support 🤠. Learn more about what it takes to be a #CS rep here: https://www.custify.com/blog/what-are-customer-success-reps/
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If you’ve ever experienced burnout, you know how catastrophic it is. Burnout is a mix of feeling exhausted, negative, and distant from your job all at once. It also results in reduced efficiency at work, which in turn affects a company’s customer satisfaction and profits.
Unfortunately, burnout is quite common in the United States. Almost half of US workers report feeling burnt out sometimes, while another 23% report feeling burnt out often. Together, that’s a shocking majority of people feeling burnt out.
And, those stats are even higher for customer support representatives, including call center agents. An overwhelming majority of call center agents (74%) are at risk for burnout. Maybe that’s why call center agent turnover rates are over double than those of other occupations. have over double the turnover rate of other occupations.
How to Foster Agent Engagement in a Hybrid Contact Center
Attention all call center managers – don’t worry! Call center agent burnout is common but easily prevented. Let’s dive into common reasons for call center burnout, how to recognize it, and how to fix it!
What are the signs of call center burnout?
Agents usually experience burnout after a long period of consistent stress. Here are some common signs of agent burnout to look out for:

Increased absenteeism (more sick calls, requests for time off, or work abandonment).
High turnover.
Declining quality of work.
Distanced attitude towards work.
Increased irritability.

What causes call center burnout?
Call center agents don’t suddenly experience burnout overnight. There are a few factors that contribute to agent burnout over time.
Work overload.
Call center agents are constantly helping customers or staring at a screen. Paired with stringent break policies and high call volumes, it’s easy for agents to feel overworked. Long hours also contribute to decreased productivity and higher rates of burnout.
The work-from-home era blurred the lines between work and home. This is especially true for call center agents, who need real breaks to disconnect from work.
Lack of support and feedback from management.
Agents handle the customers, while managers handle the agents. However, that doesn’t mean your agents are always prepared and supported when they deal with customers. If you don’t check in with your agents or support them when they handle angry customers, they will undoubtedly feel lost or frustrated, which leads to agent burnout.
Feedback is also essential for high performance. If you’re not providing feedback to your agents, you increase the risk of repeated mistakes.
How to Make a Call Center Agent Engagement Survey
Stress.
Call center agents deal with more stress than the average employee. Listening to angry customers, hearing complaints, and managing high customer service expectations while being constantly watched can make anyone feel stressed.
The sad reality is that call center agents deal with a lot of negativity at work, which takes a toll over time. High levels of stress lead to agent burnout.
Unclear goals.
As a manager, you have a lot on your plate. From call monitoring to agent and operations management, we know how tough it is to effectively keep a call center going.
But, you can’t slack on setting clear and realistic goals for your agents. Unfortunately, many call center managers forget to discuss goals consistently with their agents. If you don’t chat about goals with your agents, they might feel lost. Even more agents will feel lost if they don’t have access to your call center metrics. Make sure you share metrics with your agents so they have clear goals to work towards.
The impact of burnout on call centers.
We already know that call centers see higher turnover rates than any other industry. Burnout is a clear contributor to that turnover rate. But, turnover isn’t the only consequence of burnout.
Absenteeism rises since 63% of burnt-out employees are more likely to call in sick. Agents feel less confident in their work, which can cost customer satisfaction. Finally, agents aren’t as likely to speak candidly about career and performance goals with management if they’re burning out.
5 tips to prevent call center burnout.
Call center burnout has severe consequences to your agents’ productivity, engagement, and satisfaction. Additionally, it hurts customer experiences and profits. Luckily, there are a few ways you as a manager can help prevent call center burnout.
Create a supportive culture.
Company culture is essential to engaging employees, improving retention, and fighting burnout. To create a supportive culture and work environment, your management team must prioritize employee wellness.
Call center agents improve skills and performance over time. Remind your employees to slow down and take time to attend to their mental health. Schedule breaks, encourage staff to take vacation days, and share mindfulness practices with your employees. Finally, make sure you support your agents when they’re handling rude customers.

TIP:
Adopt an open-door policy so agents can approach their leaders to discuss challenges with workload, training, and other concerns.

Don’t micromanage.
Your agents are capable adults who don’t need you breathing down their necks. Offer support, but never micromanage. Policies about tardiness and work breaks should be fair but also reasonable and flexible.
Life is stressful enough for most people – don’t make it more stressful with menial things like bathroom breaks. Agent micromanagement is a common contributor to high turnover.
Invest in training for your agents.
Providing customer service at a call center requires strength of character and strong knowledge about products. Agents won’t always have what it takes to improve metrics and handle customers well right off the bat. That’s why it’s important to provide ongoing training for your agents. With so many call center training methods available, there’s no excuse to slack!
Give your agents autonomy.
Remember when we talked about micromanagement? The logical opposite is employee autonomy. Let go of restrictive policies that block agents from doing their job effectively. Improve employee engagement by offering them autonomy.
Show your agents that you trust them, and offer them opportunities to take the lead in problem-solving. When they excel, praise them in front of their peers. This helps them feel more confident, which improves performance and reduces burnout.

TIP:
In order to give your agents autonomy, assess any gaps in skills and ensure they are provided ample training. The goal is to empower them to resolve customer issues on their own, and lower frequency of escalations.

Optimize your technology.
Call center technology is now essential to improving metrics, satisfying customers, and reducing agent burnout.
At certain times of the day, call centers might experience high call volume. This might be stressful for agents, especially if they aren’t scheduled properly. We know that work overload and stress both lead to call center burnout. Use technology like Fonolo’s Voice Call-Backs to deal with high call volumes and reduce the burden on your agents.
Another great tech tool for call and contact centers is live chat. Live chat helps agents handle customer concerns quickly, which improves customer satisfaction, and in turn, increases employee confidence. However, live chat should always be accompanied by an option for call escalation to a voice call.
Finally, Visual IVR is a great tech tool that offers so many benefits to contact centers, including reduced agent burnout. Scheduled call-backs, shorter response times, and real-time updates all improve customer experiences, which will improve your agents’ experiences as well.

TIP:
Make sure you assess your technology frequently. Examine your metrics and assess performance after using a certain technology. Check-in with your agents to get their opinion too, so you can update technology as needed.

Conclusion.
Burnout is a costly feeling, for both call centers and their agents. Spend some time getting to know your employees and their needs, set clear goals, and invest in the right technology to prevent burnout!The post Blog first appeared on Fonolo.

If your customer service strategy consists of mollifying angry customers, you’ll always be behind.
Life becomes a fire drill and work becomes an endless chore.
The alternative is to invest in cycles that lead to better systems.
Because better systems put out the fire when it’s really small.
And to invest in design, because better design leads to clearer promises, which are easier to keep.
And to invest in quality as the focus of production, because keeping your promises creates delight and lowers costs so much it pays for itself.

Have you heard about the biggest summit about digital-first CX? Do you want to know how world-class leaders delight customers and grow their businesses? In this article, we summarize all about RE:SOLVE, a summit organized by a leading Indian cloud-based SaaS company, Freshworks. You better save your seat for this exciting event coming on the…
The post RE:SOLVE Summit tackles the topic of digital-first CX appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

In the last couple of years, the interest in CX (Customer Experience) has risen significantly. Yet, many CX professionals would say that the term still doesn’t circulate the world to the desired degree. They often emphasize the need to focus on spreading the word and introducing CX to all parts of the globe. This article…
The post What does CX mean? appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

Of all the buttons and all the swipes and all the scrolls on all the websites, is that one you’re going to click next the very best thing you could be doing right now?
Juxtaposition has gotten out of hand. Just because it’s right next to the last thing we did doesn’t mean it’s the best thing to do next.

Customers expect frictionless service 24/7, regardless of what’s happening inside or outside your company. For larger organizations, even the simplest request requires the orchestration of complex processes and human decisions. Agents and back-office employees must handle multiple products, access numerous systems, and stay informed on a large volume of policies and procedures that continually change. To meet growing customer expectations, you need the right technology. Keep these three vital ingredients in mind to gain an edge on the competition.
Implement a 360-Degree View Instead of a Single View
Adopt Dynamic Case Management (DCM) to Support End-to-End Resolutions
Modernize on a Unified Solution Rather Than Quick-Fix Apps
Source: https://www.genesys.com/blog/post/3-ingredients-for-handling-complex-service-requests
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To optimize your call center’s performance, you need to think about improving your customers’ experience. After all, customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable.
While incredible customer service should always be a call center’s goal, it shouldn’t be your only goal. If your agents have polite, customer interactions — that’s great! But it’s not enough. Customers want a pleasant phone experience, but not as much as they want a quick and easy call resolution.
The Contact Center Guide to Managing Spikes in Call Volume
Luckily, a successful call center is within reach. With some careful thought and these helpful tips, you can optimize your call center’s performance:
1. Use metrics and act on them.
With the latest call center technologies, identifying and measuring Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) is a breeze. Use historical data, analytics, and call center metrics to measure your agents’ and overall call center’s performance. Evaluate metrics like first-call resolution, customer satisfaction score, abandonment rate, and average handle time to measure performance, and compare them to your competitors.
Then, act on your results. Set realistic goals and create a plan to either maintain or surpass strong performance, or to quickly address poor performance.
The Executive Guide to Improving 6 Call Center Metrics
2. Lead by example.
Call center performance doesn’t only rest on your agents’ shoulders. As success leaders and call center managers, you need to be an example for your agents. Ask agents for feedback, resolve issues, monitor performance, and take active steps to boost morale in the office.
The best call centers don’t have leaders tucked away in offices. Strong call center managers are on the floor helping agents, encouraging them, and helping them succeed.
3. Schedule agents strategically.
Be strategic in your workforce management, or scheduling. During peak call volume periods, make sure you don’t understaff as this leads to overwhelm for your agents and long wait times for customers.
Similarly, during slower call volume times, make sure you don’t overstaff. When too many agents are scheduled for a shift, idle time usually increases. Agents are one of your most precious but costly resources, so it’s important to ensure they are set up for success!
Use historical data to learn what timeframes your center receives the most calls. With this info, develop a forecast to figure out how many agents you need each shift. It’s also a good idea to have your more experienced agents working during peak call times.

TIP:
If you notice that agents are idle despite your strategic scheduling efforts, ask how you can support them and help them reduce their idle time. Employee engagement is necessary for improved productivity.

4. Improve training to address gaps.
Training your agents is essential when optimizing call center performance. The good news is, there are many call center agent training options available! From seminars and videos to group training and one-on-one coaching sessions, there is no excuse to slack on agent training.
Another great tip is to use customer profiles to inform training. The most successful agents are well-versed with the behaviors of even the toughest customers. By combining training efforts with customer profiles, you will give your agents a step up in their training and position them for success.
5. Use and evaluate your technology.
Technology is a great tool for all businesses, especially call centers. It improves communication, customer experience, and profits while giving call centers a competitive edge. Here are just a few call center technologies that help improve call center performance:

Fonolo’s Voice Call-Backs reduce hold times, improve customer satisfaction, and heighten call center productivity.

Visual IVR is more accessible to customers and increases a call center’s responsiveness through multiple digital channels.
Smart technology like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and real-time customer service chatbots are great for both agents and customers. They help reduce high contact volume and let agents focus on more complex issues with customers.
And, technology that allows customer self-service improves efficiency and satisfaction.

Top Contact Center Technology Trends You Shouldn’t Ignore
Clearly, call centers need technology to optimize performance. But having the technology isn’t enough. It’s also important to regularly evaluate your tools and ensure they are serving your agents well. Conduct research to find out the latest software that other call centers are using, and ensure your tools are up to date. For example, if your data management system is out of date, you might miss an opportunity to collect different types of important customer data. Update your technology, and evaluate the efficiency of your technology at least once a year.
Conclusion.
Call center performance optimization is attainable. With proper scheduling, training, technology, leadership, and performance measurement, you can take your call center to the next level. What would you add to this list?The post Blog first appeared on Fonolo.

You can read this post in six minutes. It took me more than an hour to write.

That extra editing and polish is a benefit to the reader.

You can read this post instead of 100 others, because people highlighted or shared or ranked or otherwise filtered the other things you might be reading. That curation created value as well.

The math here is compelling indeed: 1,000 would-be authors pitch books but only 30 get published. Each book takes a year to write but just six hours to read. And you didn’t read all thirty of them, just the one that had the best reviews… 10,000 hours of work by authors and editors to deliver six hours to you.

The time dilation of polish and curation is possible because of asynchronicity and the one-to-many nature of publishing ideas.

Asynchronous because you’re not doing it live, reading it as I write it.

And one-to-many because the work of a creator is multiplied across many readers.

A friend recently sent me a note via voice mail. It was 14 minutes long. Because he didn’t spent another ten or fifteen minutes editing it into a three-minute long email, he wasted a ton of my time. But the nature of 1:1 interaction meant that it was either his time or mine, even steven.

And listening to someone live, at an open mic nite or at a concert, promises wonderful surprise, but it also means that there’s bound to be a lot of dead time. Because no one is curating, and you have no selection advantage.

One of the surprising unsung benefits of the worldwide web and the organized sharing of information is time dilation. A benefit we constantly waste by seeking the more human habit of mindlessly taking what comes, in real-time instead.

Time invested in your CX strategy, employee development, and customer loyalty programme may all be for nothing after just one poor customer experience. Can you still afford not to make timely business interventions? Every leader knows that keeping customers happy and loyal is vital to a successful and growing business. Many companies claim to have…
The post Poor customer experience: what’s the real cost? appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.