Why Happy Agents Mean Happy Customers

The world of customer experience (CX) has plenty of ways to measure how happy customers are. The health of a company’s CX delivery can be determined by its CSAT (customer satisfaction) and NPS (net promoter score) ratings.

These two metrics steer organizations’ CX strategies enough that Verint regularly publishes CSAT- and NPS-focused research for retail, banking and other sectors.

The same level of scrutiny isn’t placed on measuring and understanding agent experience (AX). However, it should be, because AX has a huge impact on a company’s CX quality. Happy agents = happy customers.

Keeping your workforce happy requires solutions that help make them more efficient, helpful and compliant. If employees don’t have the right tools to deliver great experiences, they will spend their working days frustrated and dealing with annoyed customers who can’t get their issues resolved quickly.

And businesses can’t afford to get it wrong…labor markets have seen volatility in recent years. There are 1.7 million fewer employees  in the U.S. compared to February 2020 and around half are open to switching jobs.

It’s why AX has become a key battleground for organizations trying to attract and retain the best customer-facing staff.

Augment the Workforce with AI Solutions

Investing in the right technology can have a hugely positive impact on your employees’ working life. Using AI and automation to augment the workforce can create a huge amount of extra capacity in an agent’s day-to-day activities.

To do so effectively, there are three key requirements to deliver great AX:

Agents Working Across Channels

Contact center leaders should ensure their agents have a ‘single pane of glass’ to view customer interactions across voice and digital channels, all in one place. Enabling them to work on multiple channels prevents agents from feeling bored by only working on phones or live chat during their shift.

The single location for all customer communications means that they can offer the same level of service no matter where a customer reaches out.

Workforce Efficiency

Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions free up agents’ time by taking on the less interesting tasks that are vital for delivering great CX.

Whether it’s containing customer queries, summarizing interactions, or finding relevant content to share, AI bots elevate agents’ performance by giving them more capacity to handle more complex queries.

Employee Engagement

Agents have lives beyond the contact center, so they need to feel it’s possible to strike the correct work/life balance—especially with the increase in remote working. Being empowered to manage their own schedules creates a more engaged, happy workforce.

Engaged employees feel valued by their employer, which leads to less agent churn and saves valuable time and money on recruitment and training.

Delivering Exceptional AX With Verint’s Platform

Channel Automation

To maximize an agent’s capacity, it’s important to give them the tools that ensure they only handle most relevant cases in the most effective way possible. Verint Channel Automation™ improves AX by uniting conversations across every engagement channel into an agent’s desktop.

AI-powered bots help customers to self-serve and help route conversations to the right agent, providing context for current and past interactions at the same time. All these functions work in tandem to ensure agents have the best opportunity to handle the high-value, complex queries.

TimeFlex Bot

Providing an adjustable work schedule that satisfies an agent’s need for work/life balance without impacting your CX delivery is a tall order for contact center leaders. But not doing so can lead to an increase in unplanned absences and higher agent turnover.

The Verint TimeFlex Bot ™ uses AI to enable agents to make as many changes to their schedule as needed, without harming a company’s service levels. The bot also increases supervisor capacity by removing the need for them to approve multiple shift changes.

Integrating this bot into your CCaaS platform can help reduce attrition and unplanned absences by up to 25% and save your company millions of dollars annually.

Knowledge Suggestion Bot

Customers need your workforce to be their font of knowledge to resolve their issue. But it’s unrealistic to expect every agent to have an encyclopedic knowledge of every aspect of a business. So, they need tools to help save vital seconds and minutes to find the right information.

The Verint Knowledge Suggestion Bot™ provides knowledge base assets to an agent’s desktop, based on the context of the customer conversation. It greatly minimizes the need for lengthy searches that can frustrate both customer and agent.

Immediate access to knowledge also boosts productivity and efficiency by resolving customer issues much more quickly.

Real-Time Coaching Bot

Much like the Knowledge Suggestion Bot, this AI capability helps your agents with in-the-moment guidance. Customer-facing teams must retain a huge amount of information, from compliance procedures to remembering when to upsell, and empathizing with the customer.

Verint Real-Time Coaching Bot ™ offers tailored guidance to agents when they need it, elevating their performance in specific, targeted areas.

The bot helps to reduce average call handling time and improves compliance while driving more sales and retention. Each agent will improve under its guidance, with the aim of getting every agent performing as well as your best agent.

Interaction Wrap Up Bot

Writing post-call summaries is important work, but definitely not the best part of an agent’s day. It’s time-consuming for your workforce and costs companies millions of dollars a year in lost contact center hours.

Verint Interaction Wrap Up Bot increases your agent’s capacity by using generative AI to automatically summarize the customer interaction – creating an accurate, consistent and unbiased record of every conversation. It reduces both the call time and agent workload.

Increase Your AX Now

Given the importance of AX to maintaining high service levels, it’s vital for companies to invest in AI-powered solutions that enhance the experience of their workforce. The five examples above work together to create a more efficient contact center and elevate both AX and CX.

However, you don’t need to rip out all your old technology and replace it all with new bots to create AI outcomes. Organizations can start small, integrating a single bot and scaling once the ROI possibilities are proven.

If you’d like to discuss how Verint can improve your AX, request a demo here.