Solving the Burning Problem of Employee Burnout: Improve the Call Center Agent Experience
October 10, 2024
Do you know what the single biggest problem is that call centers are facing today?
You might say it’s demanding and frustrated customers, lack of scheduling flexibility, the difficulties of the agent job. Or rather, the growing pressure on call centers to do more with less—in other words, having to expand communication channels while minimizing operational costs.
While these are significant challenges, they are simply the root causes of the number one contact center problem: employee burnout!
It’s Time to Prioritize the Agent Experience
The job of a call center agent is not easy. They work long hours—sometimes on the night shift—and often have to deal with rude and/or frustrated customers. Their day is also filled with monotonous yet fast-paced tasks. They rarely have much breathing time to decompress between calls. All this can leave agents exhausted and unmotivated.
According to a recent study, 51.5% of call center agents are on the verge of burnout and 28.1% of them went as far as quitting their job as the last resort.1 At the same time, many contact center leaders are facing staffing shortages with contact center attrition rates being anywhere from 30% to 60%!2
And, replacing agents is a costly and lengthy process. All these factors urge contact centers to take steps toward reducing stress and pressure on agents and preventing them from jumping ship.
And it’s not just about employees’ well-being and job satisfaction. Burned-out agents do not provide exceptional customer service, which quickly results in low customer satisfaction scores and highly impacts the customer experience (CX).
It’s a slippery slope that doesn’t have an easy way out.
The best approach is to prevent employee burnout altogether. How? By prioritizing the agent experience (AX)—and not just CX—as happy agents ultimately mean happy customers.
Now the million-dollar question is how to keep agents happy and improve AX in a contact center.
A Smart Cure for Employee Burnout
To tackle attrition and burnout, contact centers are adopting artificial intelligence (AI) technology and generative AI. By using AI-powered bots that augment human agents and workflows, and putting this technology right into the hands of the agent, contact centers can:
- help agents feel more efficient, helpful and compliant, reducing daily stress levels
- dramatically increase agent capacity
- elevate CX as well as AX.
Let’s see how it works in practice!
Augment Agents and Workflows with AI-Powered Bots
Kyle (pictured above) is a Team Lead who manages a remote team of contact center agents. His team includes experienced and talented employees, but they are only human with their own strengths and weaknesses.
To cater to the unique needs of his team members while meeting cost and service goals, Kyle calls on a team of AI-powered, specialized bots and places them at his human agents’ fingertips—not to replace them but to augment their skills.
The bots use GenAI to help Kyle create a better agent experience in multiple ways, including:
- Flexible scheduling to help agents easily adjust their schedules or swap shifts on their own, while maintaining team balance.
- Real-time support to ease agents’ jobs when handling complex issues or difficult customers.
- Accurate and unbiased interaction summaries to free agents for more valuable work, boosting engagement and performance.
- Automated quality and performance management that captures and scores employee performance against KPIs and provides real-time coaching.
If you’re interested in how Verint bots can do all that and more, read our latest eBook: Improving the Agent Experience: Ways to Use AI in Your Contact Center Now. https://www.verint.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/improving-the-agent-experience-ebook.pdf
Improve the Agent Experience with CX Automation
The power and benefits of AI injected into call center agent workflows are undeniable. Not only can these solutions successfully improve AX and reduce employee burnout, but they can also significantly increase agent capacity, enhance CX, and generate insights through data.
Yet, many companies are still hesitant to implement such solutions in fear of having to rip and replace their entire contact center infrastructure. What if you could do it without disruption to your workflows?
With the Verint specialized bots, you can start with just one bot, one improvement area, or a subset of agents and expand as you go. The Verint bots are quick and easy to deploy and can drive immediate AI business outcomes, including improving customer and agent experience.
Learn more about how CX Automation can help your business do more with less.
1“AI for Business Success 2024-25,” Robin Gareiss, Metrigy.
2Recent Research Suggests That Something Has To Change In The Contact Center Space, Forbes, July 26, 2023