According to our survey, agent experience and performance are the biggest business challenges for nearly 50% of the respondents. How can the agent experience be improved?

Employee landscape in contact centers is diversifying

Great customer experience and highly engaged employees are tightly knit together. As purpose-driven millennials and generation Z’s have entered the workplace, contact centers, which typically suffer from high rates of employee churn, should invest in the workplace culture.

Building a culture that offers agents mentoring, collaborative working and emphasizes workplace fairness can set a company apart as the “employer of choice”. Mental well-being is discussed more and more in contact centers as well with companies restricting the number of high stress calls that an agent can make in a given day. A great workplace typically results in improvements in the business results.

Simultaneously, people over 55+ and even senior citizens are finding new career opportunities in contact centers. One implication is that contact centers need to ensure that their tools are easy to use and accessible to all users. This applies both to software and hardware and extends from the strong contrasts in the user interface to as far as the audio quality of the chosen setup.

What are the implications for Contact Centers?

User experience and accessibility become more and more important

Agents expect the same exceptional user experience from their business software that they enjoy in consumer software. Software and hardware need to fill accessibility criteria as 15% of people have some disabilities. Outstanding customer experience cannot be delivered with desktop tools designed for phone customer service.

Data-driven solution enable teamleaders to better their agents’ work

Software can help team-leaders spot insights from all the contact center data. Team-leaders can then use the data to mentor and coach their agents to performing better.

Data also empowers agents

Transparent and comparable data of agent performance can also help agents. Like the reviews of Uber drivers, agents can use the data to prove their worth. Perhaps this means turning to freelancing having employers compete for the most high-performing agents.