How to improve agent productivity for a better CX

As your business grows, the complexity of providing customer service grows as well. You have more products, which means more potential problems for customers to experience and more information agents have to learn. And with more employees and departments, contacting the right person to answer customer questions as they come is increasingly difficult.

Whatever your internal challenges are, they’re not the customer’s concern. You need to manage all the challenges of growth behind the scenes, so your customers still get the quick and seamless experience they demand. To make sure customers get their problems solved in as little handle time as possible, your agents need the means to be as productive as possible.

3 strategies for improved agent productivity

Agent productivity issues are often less about your employees and more about getting the right tools, processes, and solutions into place to enable them to do their jobs more efficiently.

1. Improve access to knowledge

Growth inevitably means an increase in customers and often includes expanding the product line as well. That means agents find themselves responsible for fielding more tickets that include a wider variety of questions. You can’t expect them to memorize the best response to every issue—they’re only human. Instead, to increase productivity, you need to make it easy for them to find the right information at the right moment.

The best way to do that is by creating a comprehensive, searchable knowledge base. Build out a library of resources that provides details of every product issue you know of and load it to a database that lets you organize and categorize it so it’s easy to find the right information within seconds. Take this a step further by giving non-customer facing teams, like billing or legal, the ability to collaborate on and edit help center articles.

That alone can make a huge difference in agent productivity and, in turn, customer happiness, but one of the biggest time wasters agents deal with is having a customer repeat the details of their problem every time they move channels—an experience customers hate too. You can save them both time with omnichannel support that ensures agents can see all relevant customer data each time they receive a ticket. Supplying agents with a 360-view of the customer’s relationship with the company, such as when they’ve reached out before, on what channels, or what they have purchased, gives agents visibility they need to provide faster, more contextual support.

2. Enable collaboration

Even with easy access to most of the knowledge they need, agents will still encounter tickets that require reaching out to other departments in the company to answer. Sometimes the answer lies in details only the product department or warehouse has. When that happens, agents need a way to find the right person and get a response from them quickly.

Develop a streamlined process for contacting people in other departments, using the channels that make the most sense within your org, whether that’s Slack, email, or phone. Ideally, your agents should be able to identify the best contact information and get the message out within the same dashboard they use to manage their tickets, to save time moving between products. Agents can then have context from those interactions with other teams saved within that ticket, so they can improve responsiveness with customers.

3. Track everything to improve over time

Every time an agent solves a new ticket, it’s an opportunity to learn. The more information you have about your customers and their common issues, the better equipped you are to create processes and resources that help agents deliver the right answers faster every time.

To that end, create a process for continually tracking tickets and monitoring performance. Build reports that help you better understand your customers and measure how efficient your processes are now. That data will reveal the most common issues customers contact you for, and the best answers to each of them. Use that information to strengthen the resources you provide agents, so they can provide better responses faster in the future.

Improved agent productivity is better for everyone

When you empower your agents to work more efficiently, it makes your agents’ lives easier and enables them to provide better customer support. That improves customer outcomes since they get the answer they need faster from agents that actually like doing their job. It’s a win-win for all involved.

To learn more about how to improve team productivity at Zendesk, visit >> here.


Want a really easy way to immediately improve customer experience? Consult us for your CX Transformation and Zendesk Trial today.

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