Developing better agents

All call centre specialists know that there is a direct relationship between the job satisfaction of agents and the levels of customer satisfaction obtained over the medium to longer term.

A positive working environment is crucial to maintaining and enhancing agent morale and performance. Empowering agents is commonly viewed as a method for fostering a desirable positive environment.

The new wave of contact centre technologies provides opportunities to help agents achieve a greater sense of empowerment, while at the same time helping to improve productivity and reduce operating costs.

Agent development can be thought of as the art and science of coordinating all the tools and technologies in the call centre, to extract the maximum value from agent resources. After all, agents are the front line of customer interaction and they are the ones, almost by definition, who are responsible for the success, failure and ultimate health of the business.

So, how can you make sure that expensive and thorny issues like training, recruitment and hiring all play nicely with corporate budgetary goals? And how can you head off perennial problems like high turnover and low retention?

The technologies that focus on enhancing agent performance across the entire job lifecycle - from pre-hire assessment through training, monitoring and quality assurance - all work better together than they do as disjointed silos of information. Put together, they are "agent development" tools.

The best place for intervening and ensuring that you develop the very best call centre agents, is in screening applicants for specific contact centre skills before they are even hired.

Besides basic aptitudes and information skills, these potential agents should be tested on call handling skills as well, through simulation. Here you can test for speech quality, ability to efficiently answer questions and the potential agent's overall customer interaction skills.

Then there is the initial training. If agent recruits take their first live call feeling insufficiently confident and under-prepared, they are more likely to perform poorly. Only effective, thorough initial training, including customer interaction simulations - learning by doing - can give the agent the proper preparation to take on live calls.

In addition, managers should be on the look out for the skills their best agents have acquired from hard-won experience. What the manager really wants is to have those very same skills in healthy supply across the entire contact centre. These best agent practices are invaluable to improving performance, and in building team morale.

Modern contact centres strive to provide customers with specialised service, regardless of how the customers communicate with the company. Traditionally, the primary communication channel customers used to reach the contact centre was the telephone.

However, with the arrival of the Internet, the number of contact channels between the customer and the company has grown substantially due to the use of the new channels, such as email, Web collaboration and Web chat and Voice over IP.

The transition from call centres to multimedia contact centres provided an answer to challenges arising from an increasingly competitive market place. How were organisations to reduce costs, enhance customer service, and join powerful new communication technologies? The perfect answer was the emergence of the contact centre. This solution, however, brought new challenges, such as the human resources issues associated with a significant number of people working at the same location and doing the same kind of work.