Increasing Agent Productivity & Satisfaction

Many companies acknowledge the value of a eus tomer-centric business approach,

Your agents often stand as the sole personal representation of your business in a customer's mind. But in order for agents to deliver the type of customer service and degree of productivity that you require of them, they must be engaged and motivated. Yet agent productivity is typically measured and enforced in only the most rudimentary ways, and poor agent job satisfaction levels are all too often accepted as the norm.

Striving to increase agent productivity while also seeking to improve satisfaction should not be conflicting goals. On the contrary, at Genesys we believe that agent productivity and satisfaction are positively correlated and can combine to fuel both topline revenues and bottom-line profitability.

Automation, knowledge at the desktop, task blending, intelligent routing, and workforce optimization are among the many technologies that support management policies that enable agents to meet business goals while supporting their needs for variety, empowerment and, most importantly, their innate desire to satisfy the customer.

DRIVING BUSINESS GROWTH AND PROFITABILITY

An enlightened agent management strategy-coupled with enabling technology and operational excellence-can drive a virtual chain of business benefits and yield a tremendous return.

* Agent Productivity and Agent Satisfaction: Simply put-the proper synergy between the two serve as twin engines to drive your business results.

* Operational Efficiency: Productive agents naturally allow you to do more, and do better, with less. Satisfied agents are likely to be highly efficient and productive, and their tenure makes them your most trusted staff members.

* Employee Retention: Agents are motivated not only by good salaries and career development opportunities, but also by serving customers well and being recognized for doing so. Emphasizing quality AND productivity metrics helps to engage the agent and increase satisfaction.

* Customer Satisfaction: Agent morale has a direct impact on service delivery levels and customer satisfaction. Motivated and engaged agents with access to the proper tools and technology will have more efficient, effective customer interactions and ensure better customer satisfaction and loyalty.

* Cost Savings and Sustainable Growth: Investing in your agents will result in an optimal business outcome by making your contact center your best branding vehicle, and by saving costs and driving company profitability.

GETTING THE MOST FROM YOUR AGENTS

Your success in reaping the value of increased agent productivity and satisfaction depends on attention to four key areas: Automation, Measurement, Effectiveness, and Empowerment.

Automation

Your call center should make the most of technology to assist agents in their work. Basic caller information should be collected by an automated system, and calls intelligently routed to self-service or a skills-matched agent. On each call agents should have access to all appropriate customer data and history, as well as tools to process the customer request, guarantee an efficient customer experience, and ensure first contact resolution.

Measurement

Your contact center should measure quality, efficiency, productivity and business metrics. Top-line business and performance goals for the organization should transparendy cascade down through recognized group and individual key performance indicators (KPIs). Individual agents should be able to view their performance against KPIs in real time at their desktops, while you track progress across all measures, benchmark against the competition and track customer satisfaction ratings down to individual agents with real time post-call surveys.

Effectiveness

You should manage customer interactions according to segmentation rules aligned with your business goals, route them to appropriate agents or self-service channels, and manage varying traffic conditions with flexible call-handling, automated task blending and policies that reduce agent stress and inactive periods. Self-service, call backs, multi-contact center load balancing, and outsourcing should also be utilized to handle peak call volumes.

Empowerment

Your policies should strive to create an enjoyable work environment and foster agent satisfaction. Agent suggestions and feedback should be encouraged and acknowledged, agents should be continually trained, and they should be recognized and rewarded for their performance. They should also have a variety of tasks to perform and some freedom in choosing how and when to accomplish tasks, take breaks or schedule shifts.

NINE WINNING STRATEGIES

Genesys has developed proven, actionable strategies that you can implement to help to increase Agent Productivity and Satisfaction - and your bottom line.

1) Effectively utilize customer data: Before a word is even spoken by an agent, it is possible to identify the customer calling, check the products and services the customer has previously purchased, determine the value of the customer to the business and look up details of recent interactions. All of this information-taken together-helps inform decisions on how best to handle the call. By applying different methods intelligently, you can maximize the number of customers you recognize, route calls to the most appropriate agent, and increase first contact resolution-all while saving time and increasing agent productivity.

2) Implement interaction blending: The goal of interaction blending is to implement a much greater level of consistency and efficiency in how interactions are distributed to, and handled by, your staff. Call blending provides contact centers with a way to make use of resources that would otherwise remain idle when traffic slows down. With Multimedia blending the key is to create a universal queue that handles all customer interactions, regardless of media, and intelligendy routes them to suitable agents based on business rules that take into account such factors as urgency, agent availability, customer history and queue length.

3) Utilize self-service applications: Agents generally experience the greatest job satisfaction when they can help customers resolve complex queries, rather than when they have to repeatedly answer the same simple questions over and over again. Well-designed self-service applications are an efficient way to make agents feel both productive and happy, because they're ideal for handling the simple, repetitive tasks that can quickly lead to boredom, dissatisfaction and increased agent churn rates. In addition, when the self-service application is integrated with the routing engine for your contact center interactions, you can better assist the customer if they decide that they actually do want to speak with an agent.

4) Build a virtual contact center: Before the rise of IP telephony, contact centers with multiple locations often worked in geographical silos. IP telephony adoption makes it easier and cheaper for companies to route interactions to the optimal location and agent. With a contact center solution that can 'oversee' the complete state of each location in real time, a per transaction decision can be made to send the interaction to an idle agent in any location, resulting in better load distribution.

5) Choose the appropriate agent for each customer: With skills-based routing, the system will know, for example, what languages every agent speaks, which products they have been trained to handle, and even the types of media they can manage-and the skills-based routing engine will then find the most appropriate (highest skilled) available agent. With customer-centric routing, new or high-value customers can be handled with special care, while customers that have a history of late or non-payment can be routed to your finance department. With demographic matching, the customer can be connected with the most appropriate available agent based on a shared demographic profile-taking 'soft' issues into account.

6) Ensure a variety of work options: Agents prefer having the option of working on various types of tasks. Real-time integration between the workforce schedule and the distribution engine allows contact centers to schedule shifts so that agents can handle a mix of calls, e-mails or other tasks in 'chunks' of time without sacrificing service levels. And because the distribution engine uses the schedule to decide when to send what type of interaction to whom, assignments are matched to agent skills and no additional management effort is required to orchestrate the work flow.

7) Offer home shoring: Home shoring (home-based agents) is a good strategy for increasing agent morale and creating an attractive environment for agents to work. Many agents prefer to perform their work from home and, with the adoption of IP telephony, browser-based desktops and residential broadband Internet connections, the feasibility and cost savings of working from home have increased tremendously.

8) Link the back office to the contact center: Allowing idle agents to handle back office work items, such as forms processing, is an excellent way to increase productivity and overall business efficiency. By 'pushing' these work items to agents, not only is any excess agent capacity utilized, but the efficiency of task execution can also be monitored and improved. By integrating your business workflow applications with the contact center universal queue, you are able to improve the effectiveness and reduce the human latency factor of your back office and end-to-end service process, while delivering an improved level of customer service.

9) Optimize agent performance indicators: Making the connection between personal performance and reward is a critical challenge if agents are to feel valued and recognized. While efficiency measures will always be at the foundation of contact center performance, forward-looking organizations are also measuring quality and business metrics such as revenues and contribution to corporate goals.

REALIZING THE DYNAMIC CONTACT CENTER

Contact center business managers face increasing challenges and seemingly conflicting requirements while trying to balance outcomes across all business and operational goals. While contact centers can manually adjust to changing patterns, an advanced-or 'dynamic-contact center has the know-how and technology to make automatic adjustments in real time.

The Genesys Dynamic Contact Center is designed to transform customer service by automatically optimizing customer traffic, internal resources and business outcomes across cost, quality, and revenue. As contact centers become increasingly important channels, companies can convert themselves to dynamic contact centers to automatically optimize the customer experience, foster cross-sell and up-sell opportunities and increase agent productivity.

CONCLUSION

Recruiting and training agents is costly. Their value to the business rises with their experience, so agent retention is one of the best ways of reducing operating costs. Many contact center managers, however, have felt that they simply have to live with high agent attrition rates in order to operate efficiently.

The strategies presented in this article show that good management practices enabled by appropriate technology allow contact centers to raise agent productivity and increase agent satisfaction at the same time. The outcome is outstanding business results through a winning combination of agent effectiveness and long-term retention.

Those companies that recognize their contact center as an integral part of their customer-centric business approach, and strive to manage their agents well, will achieve the greatest cost savings and increased profitability.. .while enjoying sustainable growth and a competitive advantage.

GENESYS WORLDWIDE

Genesys, an Alcatel-Lucent company, is the worlds leading provider of contact center and customer service management software-with more than 4,000 customers in 80 countries. Genesys software directs more than 100 million interactions every day, dynamically connecting customers with the right resources-selfservice or assisted-service-to fulfill customer requests, optimize customer care goals and efficiently use agent resources. Genesys helps organizations drive contact center efficiency, stop customer frustration and accelerate business innovation. For more information: visit us on the Web: www.genesyslab.com, or call +1 888 GENESYS or 1-650-466-1100