3 Reasons Contact Centres Need Technology to Improve Employee Experience

If you want to deliver the best possible customer experience, striving to have a happier, healthier and more motivated workforce is the way to go.

Employee experience and customer experience are inextricably linked.

According to a study from Temkin Group, customer experience leaders were shown to have 1.5x as many engaged employees as companies with subpar levels of customer experience.

Additionally, research from Gallup shows that highly engaged employees outperform their competitors by 147%.

Therefore, to improve employee engagement is to improve CX – and with it, help your business reap the rewards of greater customer satisfaction, retention, and repeat business.

While there are a number of ways that organisations can look to boost employee morale and working experiences through strategic management approaches, and by pushing for positive cultural change, the impact that technology can have on employee experience should not be underestimated.

And this is particularly true for those working within a contact centre environment.

Read on to learn 3 reasons why contact centres should look to improve agent experience using technology, and 3 ways they can do it.

Reason 1: Better customer data = better agent performance

Many contact centre agents are held back by a lack of available information.

In fact, 34% of contact centre agents believe they don’t have the right customer data available to them during an enquiry.[1]

Not having the right data to hand limits the level of service an agent can provide to the customer, and therefore limits customer satisfaction.

The solution: Integration with business data suites

Invest in contact centre technology that can integrate with the systems that store and process your customer data, whether you use CRM or ERP.

This will provide your agents with detailed customer data for them to draw from in order to effectively resolve their query and demonstrate an instant understanding of their issue.

Reason 2: Excess workloads are leading to burnout

74% of contact centre agents are currently at risk of burnout[2].

Employees being burned out or overly stressed can lead to

Higher turnover
Reduced performance
Potentially negative working environment

Overall, this can significantly damage your ability to deliver the best possible customer experience.

Consistently high call volumes will contribute significantly to stress, anxiety and burnout amongst your agents.

The solution: IVR and flexible call routing

Flexible call routing and interactive voice response (IVR) can help to evenly distribute workload, and support contact centre teams when sudden spikes in inbound activity occur.

IVR can handle and resolve simpler enquiries, preventing agents from being overwhelmed by high volumes of easily avoidable, basic questions.

Flexible call routing allows teams to adapt their approach and redistribute the total workload of calls on the fly.

This means no agent is overwhelmed, and each customer keeps moving towards a resolution – both of which serve to enhance your level of customer experience.

Reason 3: Training will keep your team together

More than 50% of agents leave contact centres due to a lack of training and advancement opportunities[3].

Without sufficient learning and development, contact centre agents will feel unsupported and unprepared, and as a result, experience more stress in their role.

This, as you might imagine, also impacts their ability to deliver a high level of customer experience.

The solution: Automated call recording and reporting

Due to low call monitoring volumes, businesses are lacking the data they need to refine their customer experience and optimise agent performance.

Automated call recording allows you to implement monitoring across your whole team with no extra effort required.

This gives you a wealth of agent performance data to analyse and customer incidents to learn from.

You can draw from this when both onboarding new staff, and when training existing employees to better handle scenarios they typically struggle with, helping to strengthen the weakest link in your performance chain, and enhance your overall level of service delivery.

Conclusions: why contact centres need technology to improve employee experience

The key thing to remember here is that if your employees are more engaged, this will have a knock-on effect of greater customer satisfaction, and thus higher levels of retention, repeat business, and profit.

And this is not simply the opinion of a few theorists in the field of contact centre dynamics, it is a proven fact.

Three of the most prevalent issues which are preventing contact centre employees from being engaged are: