Narratives around call center operations are constantly evolving. In an era of cost containment, labor shortages, and customer experience, everyone is looking for a “do it all” magic elixir. Supporting your workforce with the tools and guidance they need to succeed as revenue-generating agents is in the best interest of your business.
Enter “in-house” Brand Champions. Aiming to have your call center agents be loyalty-driving, brand-enhancing assets automatically makes them integral to optimizing your organization. Their enthusiasm and passion for your product or services influences and inspires your customers. Think of your call center agents as brand advocates – people so invested in your organization they consistently provide valuable feedback. They care about contributing to improvements and the longevity of the brand.
It makes perfect sense for organizations to recognize the power of having their own employees serve this function – especially employees on the front lines of delivering customer experiences. Let’s explore ways call center managers can encourage agents to function as Brand Champions and how our team at Brightmetrics™ can help.
1. Provide Agents with Access
Ensure your team has access to the information necessary to deliver a world-class experience to your customers. Empower agents with the ability to make relevant suggestions that lead to sales growth and superior customer experiences. This can take the form of coaching your agents to harness the power of public wallboards and real-time stats.
These tools can help them determine if an opportunity exists to add a genuine, thoughtful customer service “touch” with a simple interaction like: “We really appreciate your business and patience. I know the wait time was a little longer than normal. I’m going to send an offer to your email for 25% off your next purchase just as a thank you.”
Another way to provide agent access to meaningful tools? Allow them to access their own performance metrics, then watch their progress over time. Comparing performance metrics to their peers empowers your agents and establishes personal accountability. Reports like weekly scorecards can show your agents how they’re performing on established benchmarks, objectives, and goals. This helps agents feel like their performance is within their scope of control.
Empower autonomy and self-management strategies for your staff with advanced analytics. Discussing performance expectations with your agents is an important part of every call center manager’s management strategy. However, this can be extremely time-consuming, especially when managing larger teams, and these discussions are just one of the many demands on your time.
Employees who feel engaged with their performance and workplace are employees who feel capable of properly taking care of the customers. For example, by using Brightmetrics analytics to monitor their call handle time, Brand Champions can see when there’s not a throng of customers waiting in the queue. They feel more control over their customer interactions and can take extra steps to provide an exemplary customer experience whenever time allows.
Simply taking a few minutes to send a brief follow-up email with details discussed in the call is more likely to result in an excellent CSAT score. The members of your team who are rising to the Brand Champion echelon are going to perform that much better by having Brightmetrics analytics on their side.
2. Amplify Agent Power
Give them decision-making power with your customers. Empower your agents to look at the available data in order to make quick, personalized decisions that will leave memorable impressions. For example, this can be as simple as providing the tools your agents need to facilitate credit card transactions in secure, simple exchanges, helping reduce the effort for your clients and pain points for your agents.
Customer support in today’s work environment is spilling over to less traditional channels like chat, email, and online apps. Contact centers need to be especially cognizant of PCI compliance and security. Consumers expect timely notifications and user-friendly channels to request support without placing a phone call. This means companies are looking for ways to proactively deliver customer service touch points.
This can include:
- Texts with tracking information for packages
- SMS or web chat functionality integrated with common inquiries help
- Call-back options
- Automatic follow-up calls
Regularly soliciting customer feedback and providing multiple channels for customer support helps to reduce inbound call volume and wait times, resulting in improved customer satisfaction.
Cultivating Brand Champions will undoubtedly boost your brand, but it may require structural implementations or policy shifts within your organization. Ultimately, you want to create a culture where your employees feel like they have a voice, along with the resources they need to best serve your customers. When your agents feel like they have the resources, tools, and authority to take care of customers in a meaningful way, they’re more apt to enjoy their job and remain with your organization.
3. Leverage Analytics and Reporting
Help your agents grow into Brand Champions by investing in better customer engagement analytics and reporting tools. By integrating flexible dashboards and simple drag-and-drop templates, agents can easily access actionable customer insights.
Tools like Brightmetrics help organizations gain a greater understanding of the overall performance of their contact center. Teams can access a variety of performance metrics within our summary dashboards and reports. Bring historical analytics and trends to light, or drill down into individual call details with cradle-to-grave reports.
Brightmetrics is designed to integrate seamlessly with the Genesys Cloud and Mitel platforms to provide valuable insight for your entire organization, from high-level stakeholders to your frontline agents. The dynamic dashboards and reports are easily customizable so that your agents can focus on the key performance indicators that matter most to them and the organization.
