Common Pain Points Support Agents Face and How to Solve Them Using a Contact Center Software
Though contact centers sport a cheerful vibe, agent turnover is reported to be the number one challenge in contact centers1 across industries. Drilling down on this problem reveals that agents face a number of pain points while working at contact centers that are causing them to leave. Why should this worry you?
With stats stating that companies which have happy employees outperform their competitors by 20%2, it is important for you to make sure that your team is genuinely happy at work.
In this article, we’ll discuss the common pain points faced by support agents in contact centers. We’ll also see how using a cloud-based solution can address these pain points and in turn, help your team provide better customer service.
Common Pain Points Faced by Support Agents
#1 Repetitive Work
80% of the questions that support agents receive are the basic how-to ones. So your customer support team spends most of their day answering basic repetitive questions that customers have while using your product or service. Since the support agents type out the same response over and over again and this makes the support agent’s job mundane and repetitive.
#2 Lack of Data Visibility
When different teams use different tools to manage their tickets, keeping track of customer conversations and other relevant information becomes difficult.
For instance, when the resolution of an issue requires the help of a developer, the support agents needs to pass the ticket the dev team. Once the ticket has moved on to the dev team, the support agent is unaware of the status of the ticket. This lack of data visibility prevents the agent from giving the customer an update on their issue. This, in turn, stops them from resolving the issue on time and thus takes a toll on their performance.
#3 Constant Pressure
The digital customer today uses different channels to contact a business. Sometimes, because of the availability of multiple channels, customers raise the same request on different channels in an effort to be heard.
So, when your team uses different tools to manage conversations on different channels, it becomes difficult to keep track of the issues that are raised.
Constant juggling between tools also eats into their work hours and affects the resolution time. Long resolution time has a dominos effect on the customer’s experience which is followed by a poor CSAT rating.
Agents find it challenging to meet their targets on time and are stressed because of this. To add on, contact centers lack a system in place to track and measure agents’ performance. Even the agents who meet their targets receive no appreciation and feel demotivated. A McKensy study3 conducted revealed that agents who do not receive recognition for their work exhibit higher stress levels and are more likely to leave their jobs.
Here’s How a Contact Center Software Can Help You Solve the Pain Points of Support Agents:
A contact center software is a tool used by customer-facing teams to manage conversations coming in from different channels.
While your team might be apprehensive of going digital, once they get comfortable with the tool, there is no looking back. Here’s why:
#1 Automate Repeated Tasks
In contact centers, agents spend most of their time answering the basic how-to questions. With a contact center software, you can automate the process of resolving these questions.
For instance, the answers that agents repeatedly type out can be saved as a template or canned response. And with a single click, the agent can execute a scenario automation that updates the property fields of the ticket and marks it as resolved or closed.
When the mundane tasks are automated, your team can focus their time and effort on more complicated problems.
Additionally, as an admin, you can automate the process of routing and assigning incoming tickets to the right team or agent and ensure that the work is distributed optimally.
#2 Put an End to Silos
A contact center software offers features specifically for the purpose of collaboration. By using Freshconnect, a collaboration tool powered by Freshworks, your agents can effectively collaborate within the team and also get help from people who aren’t a part of your team without losing context of the issue.
The next time your support team requires the help of someone from the dev team, you can use shared ownership, a feature in Freshdesk that will help you keep track of the status of the issue ever after it’s been passed on to another team. That’s not all, here are two more features that can help you collaborate better:
– Linked Tickets
When there’s a flurry of tickets that is caused by a website outage or downtime, you can link all the related tickets in a tracker, and resolve them in one go as opposed to resolving just one ticket at a time.
– Parent-child Ticketing
Sometimes to resolve some issues, you’ll need to break it down to smaller tasks and have different people work on it in parallel.
For instance, the process of onboarding an employee can be broken down into different steps. With the parent-child ticketing feature, you can create a parent ticket called ‘agent onboarding’ and create child tickets for the sub-tasks and assign them to the respective agents. By doing this, you can keep track of all the tasks and also improve your team’s productivity.
#3 Lessen the Burden on Your Team
– Balancing Your Team’s Workload
A contact center software streamlines incoming requests from different channels into one platform and serves as a one-stop shop for you to engage with your customers by retaining complete context of their issues. So the next time a customer reaches out to your agent with the same issue on different platforms, the agent can respond with complete context of the issue.
To add on, with the omniroute feature that auto-assigns emails, chats and calls to your agents based on their bandwidth, you can optimally balance your team’s workload. This feature also lets you avoid overloading your agents during rush hours and gives them time to cool down before their day ends.
– Improving First Response Time
Another struggle faced by your team is maintaining a low first response time. With 80% of customers saying that they expect a response within one hour4 of reaching out to a brand, maintaining a low first response time while handling high volume of tickets can get quite challenging.
To tackle this problem, you can use a chatbot. A chatbot is powered by a machine learning algorithm that analyses the customer’s question and fetches solutions from the knowledge base to resolve your customers’ questions through chat and email. Chatbots can effectively bring down the first response time by providing instant solutions to your customers’ issues.
– Deflect Incoming Tickets
Apart from omnichannel strategy and the chatbot, a contact center software also enables your team to set up a self-service portal. A self-service portal/ knowledge base is a collection of solution articles that document features about your product/service and other commonly asked questions. Your customers can use this to find answers to questions on their own. This helps in bringing down the number of incoming tickets.
– Gamify Customer Service
To get your team to be excited about providing customer service, make a game out of it. Allot points for each agent’s effort in achieving the target you’ve set for them. With the virtual points, badges and trophies awarded to agents who are performing well, you are recognizing their efforts and giving them something of value in return. This way, you’re not only breaking the monotony but also motivating your team to perform better and grow.
Additionally, you can use the dashboard and set up widgets that monitor metrics that matter to you and your team. Adding widgets like average first response time or tickets that are pending, encourages your team to close out tickets faster and also helps you identify bottlenecks and prevent them from occurring.
Hit Two Birds with One Stone: Keep Your Team Happy and Provide Great Customer Experience
Contact centers handle an integral part of businesses and it is important for the contact center team to perform their level best. To ensure your contact center team is able to carry out their day-to-day activities without feeling demotivated or fatigued, you need to give them an intuitive and easy to use system.
Sign up for Freshdesk and bring your contact center team to the cloud today!
Source:
1–https://blog.contactcenterpipeline.com/2017/05/agent-turnover-still-no-1-challenge-for-contact-centers/
2–https://blog.contactcenterpipeline.com/2017/05/agent-turnover-still-no-1-challenge-for-contact-centers/
3–https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/Business%20Functions/Operations/Our%20Insights/Boosting%20contact%20center%20performance%20through%20employee%20engagement/Boosting-contact-center-performance-through-employee-engagement.ashx
4–https://www.toistersolutions.com/blog/2015/4/13/get-ready-to-respond-to-customer-email-within-one-hour
