Jason ordered a new phone a week ago, and there’s no sign of it. So, he tries calling customer service and is greeted by the all too familiar (but, nonetheless, frustrating) ‘Hello valued customer, all our agents are busy right now, please wait on hold; you are 7th in line’.
Is it the agents’ fault? No, those poor folks at the contact center are busy answering the same questions over and over again to multiple customers. They’re just as frustrated as Jason is.
So, how do you make your agents’ lives easier, while increasing their productivity? It’s not as hard a task as you think. Sometimes, all it takes is 5 simple steps for you to get extremely productive agents..
How to increase agent productivity?
(Ps. Keep reading, we've got a great bonus tip for you)
About 80% of the customer queries you receive and repetitive in nature. How do you plan on boosting agent productivity if you have them sitting around, answering the same questions, over and over again like broken records?
You need to automate these repetitive, monotonous questions. You don’t need to waste human energy answering them.
Prioritize your agents' time. Assign them only to the complicated questions. Let the AI chatbots handle the simple customer issues so that your agents actually have the time to answer the tougher ones.
Do you seriously want your live agents to waste their time asking customers questions that they’ve already answered in previous conversations?
Maybe they’ve already had a conversation with your bot, who transferred them to the agent. Now if they have to repeat themselves, it's going to frustrate your customers and waste your agents’ time. Sounds like a lose-lose situation.
Now, if you just provide your live agents with the recent conversations that the customer has had with your bot or any of your agents in the past, the agent currently serving them could have context and solve their problems without asking them to repeat themselves. See, you’ve turned that into a big win there and are now succeeding at increasing customer satisfaction.
Here's an article on time management matrix that can be followed to be more productive.
You definitely need to be engaging your customers on multiple channels. But that’s no excuse for confusing your agents (and, in turn, your customers).
What you need to do, is adopt a one-view inbox. Give your agents access to all the conversations with the customer, across all the channels, in one place. To manage everything in one place you can even use a client collaboration portal and free yourself from the trouble of running through apps and systems.
Here’s where context plays in once again. When your agents can refer to conversations across channels, the scope for confusion will be minimized and the customers won’t have to repeat themselves, you'll even manage to reduce your average handle time by doing this because your agents are not spending time asking repetitive questions.
By integrating your live chat system, your CRM and ticketing system together, you’re going to be able to save your agent’s time, while understanding your customers better.
This will even help you build superior buyer personas and generate leads with greater ease.
And, it will help increase their productivity avoiding the need to continuously hop across multiple systems and screens. It will all be in one place and the process will be seamless.
You need to keep an eye on your agents. You need to be watching them in real-time.
Look through the dashboards and you can even use any of the best Mac time trackers to get insights on your agent’s efficiency and performance.Get insights on your agent’s efficiency and performance. Observe your agents and see which ones are the best performers. Now, reward them and the others will be motivated.
Your supervisors even need to be able to take over sensitive conversations from agents and handle them in real-time, without any delays.
Get one solution that does it all
You need a Live chat software that gives you all these benefits. One that’s the perfect blend of automation and live chat.
You need system that gives your agents context about the conversations, across all the channels they take place on. That allows you to integrate it with your CRM and ticketing systems, monitor your agents’ performance in real-time and route conversations intelligently.
Engati Live Chat does exactly that for you, giving you everything you need to substantially enhance agent productivity.
Schedule your live chat demo now!
