Making life easier for agents
When discussing contact centre performance improvement, people invariably focus on improving the customer experience or driving productivity growth from the business perspective. It’s rare however for organisations to look at things from the agent’s perspective, and that’s a big mistake because our agents are an essential part of the customer service equation, and we need to pay them much more attention.
We wanted to learn more about what actually goes on at the contact centre coalface, so earlier this summer Sabio worked with YouGov to develop our ‘Voice of the Contact Centre Agent’ project, the first research programme to look at customer service issues from the agent’s perspective.
As part of the programme we asked agents what they felt were their biggest frustrations. From our sample of almost 1,000 independently recruited agents, the top five main frustrations were:
- IT systems – 48 percent
- Being unable to help customers – 47 percent
- Repetitive tasks/lack of variety – 44 percent
- Customers complaining – 43 percent
- Management approach – 40 percent
IT Systems
IT systems performance seems to be a universal problem for today’s contact centre agents, with slow systems impacting 41 percent of them daily and 86 percent weekly. Agents have grown accustomed to these high levels of interruption, with many just accepting this is how it’s always going to be or that ‘the system’s always slow on Friday afternoon’.
We believe agents are right to highlight this issue. Symptoms such as slow performance, applications crashing and hardware freezing are all signs of poorly designed and incorrectly configured systems. Similarly, complex non user-friendly processes and incomplete systems integration mean that it’s the agents who have to join everything together – the ones in our survey used four different applications at the same time on average, with the frequent need to cut and paste data between applications. Many of the systems are also poorly designed around the user interface has not been developed to make it easy for agents to help customer whilst on a call.
Too many passwords
At the same time, agents are plagued by passwords – a third are using five or more application passwords to carry out their daily role, while 30 per cent of agents spend more than five minutes each day logging into applications at the start of their shift. This volume is exaggerated by regular password changes and the need for frequent password re-entry when web applications are held up by browser time-outs.
Agents get frustrated when they can’t help
Agents also made clear that they are frustrated when they can’t help the customers they deal with, and feel that they are not always given the right tools and information to do their jobs to the best of their ability. Time and time again, the research highlights the importance of getting the simple things right – and organisations not delivering to customers results in high levels of frustration within agents in contact centres. Much of the time failures in delivery or incorrect billing results in customer contact but often organisation don’t empower the front line staff to truly resolve the issue for the customer let alone fix the broken process that allowed the issue to occur in the first place. The role of the contact centre in many organisations is still to deal with demand not challenge.
Surprising low levels of call coaching
We also found surprisingly low levels of call coaching across contact centres of all sizes and sectors, with weekly coaching a rarity, and ten per cent of agents receiving no weekly coaching at all. This is obviously a major concern in sectors such as financial services where there’s a regulatory requirement for agents to know exactly what they’re discussing.
If there’s so little coaching going on, you have to ask what Team Leaders are up to, and we suspect they’re getting tied down in too many meetings and reporting responsibilities that are being prioritised above coaching, or else they are on the phones when the call volumes get ahead of the schedules.
The wrong performance metrics
Agents were also concerned about the inconsistent use of performance metrics. Over eight out of ten agents said their calls were measured for quality, but just under a quarter of them said that these performance scores impacted their monthly pay. Customer satisfaction scores were only used to impact pay for ten per cent of agents, while over half our respondents had no performance related rewards in their pay.
We suggest that better correlation of metrics with pay is needed if agents are to be motivated to improve their performance on the criteria that we collectively believe to be important. This should involve the creation of new agent scorecards that are personal and linked directly to rewards.
