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The customer service agents are the people on the ground listening and responding to your customers. Keeping their customers happy and satisfied and making them feel like their issues are resolved smoothly and on time is very important for any business.
However, to keep your customers happy and deliver top-quality services, it is essential to keep your customer service agents happy. If they are not satisfied, then it may lead to reduced motivation which may ultimately result in delivering poor quality services to the clients, which is detrimental to any business. The brand reputation may take a hit.
Thus, it becomes extremely important to boost the productivity of your customer service agents.
Here are various methods you can adopt that will help you continuously motivate your customer service agents to perform better and deliver high-quality services.
In any job, it is always important to continuously learn, develop and enhance skill sets. In addition, it is particularly essential in the rapidly changing dynamic world. Learning new things and improving current skill sets has never been more critical. If you are following the same old pattern in which the work has traditionally been done, it will lead to redundancy.
You can provide your agents with learning support by starting an e-learning platform or giving them free access to learning tools and techniques; scheduling mandatory training relevant to their job in the office or virtually will boost their productivity.
You can also boost their motivation to continuously learn by providing learning-linked incentives and awards half-yearly or yearly.
This will result in better customer support and will also boost their confidence.
When customers are on a call with an agent, they need quick resolution to their queries.
They do not like to be kept on hold for long and spend too much time talking for small queries.
Agents spend a considerable amount of time searching and sorting data across all channels, which consumes a lot of time and builds up the customers' frustration as you make them wait. Nobody likes to spend so much time resolving a minor issue, which will leave a negative impression on the customers about the company.
Building a centralized cloud-based data structure where any information required by the agent is just a click away will significantly reduce the time spent on the call and thus will free up their time to take more calls during the day. This will also result in higher customer satisfaction and will enhance the reputation of the brand, and will make the agents more productive, and they can also take on some new tasks.
When the customer service agents know that they have some freedom to carry out their tasks daily, they will feel less pressured while doing the job, which may also lead to improvement in carrying out the task and the process in which the same is being carried out. This new way of conducting the task can also be adopted company-wide by all agents and may become a new standard or process.
Having trust in your agents that they will carry out the task as expected and giving them the responsibility of those tasks without monitoring them constantly will significantly boost their productivity and make them feel relaxed and less pressured. It will also, in turn, be beneficial for the company in the long run.
Micromanagement at any level by managers kills productivity and results in low morale.
The agents need to feel that there is more to the job than work. Organizing events and bringing together all employees to interact with every once in a while will make them feel like they're a part of a much larger structure and comfortable. It will help reduce their stress and elevate their mood. They will have something to look up to every week or every month, which will give them a chance to collaborate with others in the organization.
They will know that there are other agents as well with them, and when they interact, they can come up with new ideas and methods of which they were unaware, which will lead to an overall boost in morale and productivity.
This can be done by planning for a coffee catch-up at work, team lunch, festive events, brainstorming sessions, etc.
Agents will feel more valued and respected if their issues and concerns are heard and understood, and corrective steps are taken to address the challenges faced by the agents.
A structure should be created in the organization wherein agents are requested to provide their feedback anonymously or by name. Specific questions can be asked, ranging from yes/no, ratings, or subjective answers, where they can share their overall experience in their own words.
Looking at the overall feedback, the organization may realise where change is needed and where improvement is required. The agents themselves can support in creating the structure to bring about improvement. This will make the agents feel like their feedback is heard and steps are being taken to work towards it, and when they are part of the process, they will feel confident and valuable to be able to contribute. This will significantly lead to an increase in productivity at work.
Your customer service agents are dealing with the most crucial part of the organization, i.e. the customers. They handle all sorts of angry and disappointed customers daily who take the frustration out on the agents. Hence, it is of vital importance for every organization to keep their customer service agents happy and satisfied, which in turn will lead to overall increased customer satisfaction and will maintain or even enhance the image of the brand by leaving a positive impression on the customers.
