Increasing Agent Productivity in an Omnichannel World

In order to keep pace with the evolving technology, the marketing and customer care teams have to adapt newer strategies beyond just solving customer’s problems for delivering customer delight at every point. If done right, it can reward the business with unmatched customer loyalty and brand advocates. A smart moulding of technology, agent performance and customer experience has created a simpler yet highly effective process through an omnichannel approach.

We mentioned in our blog - 'Omnichannel transforming customer experience' the key to success in an omnichannel customer care approach lies in seamless and consistent experience across all channels – phone, text, chat, email  or social media. But success in these channels can only be ensured when we know what is working particularly in terms of agent efficiency. In the old school of customer service, the agent productivity was calculated by measuring the duration of the call, number of calls per hour and the percentage of issues resolved. Unfortunately, this straightforward calculation does not help any more in the modern age where agents use multiple channels to interact with a customer in each shift.

Let us have a look at how omnichannel approach has helped the businesses in overcoming the challenges and improving the agent productivity and efficiency

Businesses need to provide their customer care agents with a unified interface to seamlessly handle all aspects of omnichannel communication while ensuring that they have enriched data with all required information and interaction history. This saves both agents and customers time to understand the problem and therefore improves the resolution time in the first call itself. And guess what, an amazing customer experience.

With an omnichannel process of engagement, an agent can manage all interactions from any of the channel a customer decides to engage. The need for different pools of agent handling interactions from different channels is no more necessary. The process has been streamlined so well that a single agent can handle multichannel interaction with high productivity.

A single queue of interactions can help the agent handle each interaction from multichannel in the right priority. Such a system lets an agent know the entire profile, history, origin, hold time, duration of interactions across channels to give customers a superior contextual real-time experience on any channel at any time. This also helps to reduce the number of repeat interactions on a particular issue.

A unified communication approach increased agent’s productivity by up to 30%. In a disjointed communication environment, an agent lose out time while switching from one channel to another making it difficult to multi task effectively. Omnichannel environment has revolutionized the market by reducing the switching time of the agents to almost negligible.

The quality monitoring tools provide detailed feedback to agents to help them understand their performance. Omnichannel dashboard provide agents with real time feedback about their interactions on multichannel, their productivity, idle time, customer interactions handled on each channel etc. The real-time data helps an agent to improve performance and hence increase overall productivity over a period of time.

Conclusion

Omnichannel integration can provide significant strategic and operational benefits to the organization. The right blend of integrations can alter the working of the contact centre and bring meaningful gains in agent productivity and deliver substantial cost savings and improvements in operational KPIs and customer satisfaction.