Support agents play a vital role in customer service, sales, and overall business operations by serving as the direct connection with the customers.
It is essential for businesses to find effective ways to improve agent productivity, as it greatly impacts success and the quality of customer service.
However, the most common complaints and poor customer experiences from disappointed consumers are related to delayed responses and issue resolution by unqualified customer service representatives.
Even with advancements in live chat, workflow automation, omnichannel support, canned responses, and self-service platform technologies for customer support, why do businesses still suffer from unproductive support agents?
In this blog, we’ll dive in and discover how you can empower your agents to perform at their best.
Evaluating agent productivity in customer service is a data-driven process that relies on specific key performance indicators (KPIs).
These metrics provide valuable insights into individual agent performance and overall team effectiveness.
By analyzing these KPIs, managers can make informed decisions about staffing levels, operational processes, and training needs.
Some of the most common KPIs include:
These combined metrics offer a comprehensive picture to improve agent productivity and customer satisfaction within a contact center.
Customers frequently encounter issues that require resolution by businesses, particularly in customer service.
Often, agents take extended time to address and resolve these customer service problems. The following are key reasons why improving agent productivity is important.
Efficient agents not only provide better service to customers but also contribute to the overall success of your business. Here are the top practices to increase agent productivity:
To help support agents excel in their positions, start by selecting suitable employees for the customer service role.
Strong communication skills, empathy, problem-solving abilities, adaptability, and a customer-focused mindset are characteristics of effective support agents.
According to PwC, 46% of customers will stop doing business with a brand if its employees lack knowledge.
To prevent this, it’s essential to have a proper customer onboarding process that introduces new hires to the company’s policies, tools, and customers and provides them with the necessary knowledge to increase agent productivity.
You can achieve this through:
After all, a lack of agent-general knowledge can slow down and affect their ability to resolve client issues quickly within the provided time.
To enhance the efficiency and agent productivity , it is recommended that they be provided with collaboration tools like Slack, Gmail shared inbox, and Microsoft Teams.
With the help of these tools, agents can receive automatic notifications for new tickets within the chats and channels.
This advanced ticket-handling feature facilitates seamless communication and enables agents to address issues more quickly, improving customer satisfaction.
The investment in tools for agents increased by 62%, making their work easier (Cirrus). Equip your agents with the right tools and technology to streamline their work processes.
Using artificial Intelligence (AI) can assist businesses in automating routine tasks and workflows, enabling agents to dedicate less time to answering common questions and more time to developing difficult solutions.
Other tools and technologies to use include:
Establishing clear expectations to improve agent productivity begins with clearly defining each agent’s roles and responsibilities.
This involves outlining the required tasks, specifying the standards agents must adhere to, and ensuring they understand the level of service expected from customers.
When agents precisely understand their role, setting achievable targets can motivate them to stay focused, work more efficiently, and provide a basis for evaluating their performance.
Implementing a centralized ticketing system can greatly improve agents’ productivity by bringing together all customer interactions from various communication channels into one unified platform.
This eliminates the need for agents to switch between multiple platforms, saving time and minimizing the chances of overlooking any inquiries.
Additionally, this system offers a comprehensive record of each customer’s interactions through tickets, enabling agents to deliver personalized customer service and address issues quickly.
Establish clear performance metrics aligned with agent productivity goals to monitor and motivate agent operation.
Customer service software can assist with this by providing advanced data and analytics tools that track agent performance.
Businesses can track and improve agent productivity using customer service KPIs such as:
After gathering this information, discussing it with your agents is important. Openly discussing your findings can ensure accountability and pinpoint areas for improvement for both your agents and the support team.
According to research conducted by Cirrus, 70% of agents wish to have the freedom to address customer problems independently and improve first-contact resolution rates.
Customer self-service portals enable clients to track progress, submit tickets, and access information, helping agents prioritize urgent issues.
When clients can resolve their issues on their own, it leads to increased productivity for the agent.
Troubleshooting guides help agents quickly resolve customer problems. Resolved issues are sent to the FAQ section for future reference.
In addition, provide support agents with comprehensive internal knowledge base software or an FAQ software, containing relevant information and solutions to common customer queries.
This will enable them to have the information at their fingertips, reducing research time and improving their productivity.
Businesses can utilize task management tools to reduce the number of steps needed to handle a problem and improve agent productivity by dividing the work into smaller tasks.
This maintains a centralized and streamlined record of customer interactions during calls and meetings, reducing mental strain and freeing up agents’ time for handling customer inquiries.
By focusing on one task at a time, agents become more efficient and resolve customer issues faster.
By automating repetitive tasks and simplifying complex processes, workflow automation empowers agents to focus on high-value interactions, boosting both efficiency and morale.
You can implement a SLA feature to send notifications that empower agents to make decisions on their own within predefined guidelines.
This approach can save time and boost customer satisfaction by setting deadlines and enabling them to resolve problems without unnecessary escalations.
Other workflow automation features to use include:
It’s important to establish a clear and effective communication channel between your customer service agents and customers.
When agents have access to reliable and efficient communication tools, they can easily and quickly communicate with their colleagues, managers, and customers, which can help them resolve issues more effectively and efficiently.
Therefore, businesses need to ensure that their agents have access to communication channels that are easy to use, secure, and reliable, such as instant messaging, email, video conferencing, and social media platforms to facilitate quick response times and the resolution of customer queries.
This will improve internal processes and enhance the support provided to external customers by improving agent productivity and problem-solving skills.
Foster open communication in your team to promote collaboration and feedback, enhance creativity, and solve problems.
Effective communication builds trust and stronger relationships, keeping agents updated on business changes to avoid providing outdated information.
Sending a simple announcement can prevent unprepared during calls, which improve agent productivity.
Recognize and celebrate the achievements of your agents to boost morale and motivation.
Incentives such as bonuses, gift cards, certificates of achievement, or recognition can encourage agents to go above and beyond in delivering exceptional customer service.
Additionally, publicly acknowledging and rewarding top-performing agents for their efforts, milestones, and accomplishments can create a positive work environment and inspire agents to deliver exceptional service.
BoldDesk assists agents in staying focused and productive by achieving customer service goals by automating repetitive tasks, offering AI-powered assistance for better communication, and providing a central location for all customer interactions.
Through mobile apps, workflow automation, task management, and internal communication tools, BoldDesk promotes collaboration and eliminates unnecessary delays.
Agents are equipped with relevant information and a real-time task list, enabling them to assist customers promptly, resolve issues quickly, and improve overall customer satisfaction.
Contact us to arrange a live demo and experience how BoldDesk features can help you improve agent productivity in your organization. Or sign up for our free trial for immediate access.
I hope you found the article useful. Do you have any more thoughts or recommendations? Kindly leave your comments in the section below.
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