Hiring and retaining contact center agents is harder than ever. Higher call volumes and customer expectations are leading to even higher agent stress. And with remote work and demand for agents and workers of all kinds also rising, it’s easy for top talent to move on—to other contact centers or other industries.
To survive in today’s competitive job market and keep ahead of attrition, contact centers have to find ways to train agents faster and keep them longer. Which leads many to look at their technology.
Further Reading: Don’t Add More Technology, Add the Right Technology
In an effort to make the agent’s job easier, they focus on integrating all their systems into a single view designed to give agents every piece of information they might need on any call. For these contact centers, “success” is getting as much information on their agents’ screens as possible.
While a great idea, in theory, it often backfires. Agents are overloaded with information and unnecessary complication, leaving them unable to perform their job efficiently or effectively.
When you give your agents ALL the information:
- Trainers spend significant time and resources teaching agents how to use an overly complex system. In training, agents start questioning their ability to do the job.
- Speed to proficiency takes too long.
- Agents feel frustrated with the amount of comprehension required and experience lower job satisfaction as a result.
- Knowledge retention decreases as agents spend an inappropriate amount of time in the training process.
- Customers get slow and inconsistent service due to the amount of time it takes an agent to find the information they need, or agents are just unsure how to do their job effectively in general.
But when you give your agents get just the information they need:
- Training time is significantly reduced.
- Agents get on the phones quicker, increasing speed to proficiency
- Agents become confident they can do the job.
- Agent attrition is reduced by improving the agent training experience
- Agents retain the knowledge that’s key to handling complex calls
- Calls are handled with greater accuracy, and customer satisfaction is increased.
- With less information on the screen, agents can focus on soft skills like empathy.
Training time and agent attrition have been longstanding issues for the contact center industry. Strategies to combat these issues are a dime a dozen, but most contact centers continue to miss the mark.
The key to training and retaining agents, while also ensuring they deliver excellent customer service, is to simplify the agent’s job by giving them only the information they need to solve the issue when they need it. Instead of showing agents everything you can fit on the screen and making them find the answer, simply give them the answers when they need them.
