Editorial
The Gist
- Contact center agent well-being. Essential for reducing high turnover and absenteeism in contact centers.
- Empowering contact center agents. Training and continuous learning crucial for agent success and empathy.
- Resolving staffing woes. Proper staffing balances efficiency and agent well-being, enhancing customer experience.
With AI dominating headlines, it’s easy for any business decision-maker to get wrapped up in how to fast-track their teams and innovations with the emerging tech. This rings true for the contact center industry as well. We’re seeing an emergence of AI features across the spectrum, promising to solve all types of problems — though it’s only now starting to come clear how they’ll truly help businesses achieve better outcomes.
However, it's important to address contact center agent well-being as well.
As we look to the future of contact centers, it’s important to not only keep an eye on the new technologies and trends, but also reflect on how technology can positively transform the contact center workforce. In fact, for all of the operational inefficiencies and customer satisfaction problems that get airtime, 47% of call center managers still feel that the biggest problem they face when operating effectively and efficiently is high agent turnover and absenteeism.
With nearly half of contact center supervisors feeling overwhelmed by the shortage and quality of labor, one of the biggest opportunities for this industry is clear — it’s improving agent wellness. To achieve a stable and empowered workforce, it’s essential to put agent wellness at the forefront to enhance agent morale and lower turnover rates. Human agents are like an investment, putting in the time and care to ensure their success will yield dividends in the future.
Related Article: AI in Customer Service and the Evolving Role of Contact Center Agents
Contact Center Agent Well-Being: Training Employees for Success
Data shows that roughly 3 million people were employed by contact centers across the US in 2022, with each of these agents attempting to create connections with customers daily on an emotional level, and deliver an empathetic and personal experience. In fact, almost all (96%) contact center professionals believe empathy is important to their success. But if our personal lives are any reflection of the population, we know that empathy is not always a skill that comes naturally to everyone. Agents must be trained, guided and supported, to create those empathetic experiences and truly understand a customer’s needs.
An Example: Where Agent Training's a Matter of Life and Death
Take a 911 call center, for example. A call agent will never be able to know what issues are on the other end of the line during an incoming call until they pick up the phone. The importance of full and effective agent training becomes even more important, and can sometimes even be the difference between life and death. Sometimes the necessary tool is the right fact — how to quickly determine the next step. In the case of a mental health crisis, it could be the right tone and a soft-touch to de-escalate a situation. This may not come naturally to many folks — even with the best of intentions — so a system that supports and trains agents is critical.
Learning Opportunities: Keeping Abreast of Emerging Technology
After initial training, it’s equally important for businesses to offer continuous learning opportunities for their employees to uplevel their careers and allow them to stay up to date on innovative technologies, trends and practices within the contact center space. Tools are helpful and critical components in enhancing agent and customer interactions. Tools like agent coaching and suggested answers can help compensate for knowledge gaps and drive the best customer outcome.
Contact center agent well-being should be important to organizations as agents are not dispensable hourly employees, but rather valued career holders who deserve the tools, resources and learning opportunities to continue growing in an organization.
Related Article: AI in Contact Centers: Championing Your Agents
Resolving Staffing Woes
Properly staffing your contact center is imperative to answer the volume of incoming calls and actually one of the simplest ways to boost employee morale and ensure contact agent well-being.
The Right Amount of Staff
When a caller has been waiting on hold for an hour because the existing interactive voice response (IVR) was not able to resolve their problem and there aren’t enough people manning the phones at a given time, you can be assured the customer’s patience is running thin, resulting in frustration and anger from the caller and longer resolution times for the agent. Having more employees and a shorter wait time will have the opposite effect, improving the customer’s overall experience. But having too many agents sitting around idle, waiting for that next call, is not cost-efficient. So a happy middle ground must be sought — the right amount of staff to handle volume.
Matching Problems to Agents
It’s equally important for contact centers to ensure they match up the customer's problem with an agent who is best trained to deal with it. If agents can only answer the incoming customer inquiry, but not help resolve it, only half (or maybe less!) of the problem has been addressed. Even implementing a simple pre-screening question in the contact center can help a business navigate a simple password reset issue to newer agents, whereas more complicated issues, like fraud, can be routed to seasoned employees who have the institutional experience to manage the complexities.
Related Article: A 4-Step Recipe for Improving Your Contact Center Agent Experience
Providing Ample Break Time
According to USA Today, of the roughly 3 million customer service agents in the US, about 1.2 million exit those jobs every year, and abusive customers are a key reason.
Angry Customers
Customers are often angry and looking to resolve problems when calling a contact center, but agents deal with this all day every day, which can lead to exhaustion and then burnout quickly. It’s imperative for managers to monitor their teams and how they’re feeling, reading their behavior and gauging when they need to take a breath. Sending an exhausted agent into another difficult customer contact will only lead to additional exhaustion and burnout and wear away contact center agent well-being.
Stressful Scenarios
The nature of the problems agents face will vary based on their industry, but oftentimes the issues can be quite deep. For example — an agent at a medical insurance contact center may be dealing with customers who are reaching out from the hospital after their daughter had major surgery, but insurance denied the claim. In such situations, the parent is under high stress and will likely be more frustrated or even afraid, leading to high-stakes and high-stress engagements. Breaks might be required more often to protect the agent's well-being after dealing with the stress of the situation and the customer’s potential frustrations and feelings. The adrenaline of successfully solving a customer’s need may not always be enough!
Empowering Agents of the Future
According to market trends and reports, it is clear that contact center agent well-being is one area that often gets overlooked in CX. Organizations must invest in their contact center and their employees for a multitude of reasons including a better culture so negative customer service is not impacting the bottomline.
Moreover, better resources and investments across tools, policies and growth opportunities are areas necessary to run a modern and healthy contact center operation. As contact centers increasingly virtualize interactions, this becomes even more important as the issues that make it through to human agents will become increasingly complex and high-stakes.
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Though easier said than done, the writing is on the wall if and when turnovers are high, customer satisfaction is not meeting the mark and processes are broken. For the future of the contact center to be successful, leaders need to prioritize agent well-being in the present.
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