Throughout the pandemic, shops were shut, information offices closed, and banks stood empty. If consumers had a query, concern or complaint their only option would be to call a contact centre for advice.
In their role as communicators between businesses and consumers, contact centre agents are essential in providing a positive customer experience. Despite this, agents are often overworked and stressed, evidenced by the high turnover rate in the contact centre industry, which at around 26%, is considerably more than the national average of 15%.
This situation needs to be addressed. As more than four percent of the UK’s entire working population is employed in contact centres, it should be a priority to ensure employees feel satisfied – both emotionally and economically. Yet, that’s not easy – this year’s Stress Awareness Month, for instance, highlighted that 74% of UK adults have felt so stressed at some point over the last year they felt overwhelmed or unable to cope.
Contact centres are often described as ‘mills of the modern age’ with agents regularly citing excessive workloads and mundane tasks as the top reason for leaving their jobs. Organisations that want to improve their employee engagement must prioritise tackling these primary causes of turnover, and without an effective strategy, organisations risk losing employees due to burnout. Thankfully, contact centre businesses have some powerful options to help focus on improving workplace wellbeing in the short and long term.
74% of UK adults have felt so stressed at some point over the last year they felt overwhelmed or unable to cope.
Important challenges need intelligent solutions
Harnessing today’s AI and machine-assisted customer engagement tools not only eliminates the repetitive tasks that contribute to stress and high staff turnover, but they also bring the added benefits of improvements in customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores. Intelligent chatbots are a prime example, enabling organisations to automate day-to-day issue resolution for customers, liberating their call centre agents to handle more complex queries. Indeed, there is growing emphasis across various industries on the potential for automation to offer human employees more valuable and rewarding roles. Read about the Range of Affect Theory.
This is particularly relevant to the modern contact centre environment, where AI implementations use intelligent automation to augment people, rather than replacing them. For example, AI can be used to present information to an agent during customer interactions or automatically complete forms during conversations. This not only reduces the time agents spend looking up information by 15-20%, it also makes it easier for them to resolve customer queries quickly and accurately.
By working hand-in-hand with technology, human agents are also able to serve customers better and get through workloads faster without getting bogged down by repetitive low value tasks.
For example, streamlining the agent routing processes by matching the right caller with the right agent and enhancing call centre forecasting and scheduling by utilising self-learning algorithms can more appropriately balance workloads for the human workforce, all while delivering a better experience for customers.
Recommended reading: What is a Toxic Workplace and How to Handle Toxic Employees
Augmenting the experience
Companies across various B2C sectors, including retail and utilities, are already investing in omnichannel machine-assisted customer engagement, using AI to enhance the roles of contact centre personnel. But, for these efforts to pay-off on a general, industry level, companies will need to ensure their contact centre workforce is given the necessary skills to work effectively with AI. This starts positioning virtual agents as valuable collaboration assistants that are there to make the working lives of human agents better. For AI to succeed in the workplace, the message should remind people that the emphasis is on job augmentation, not replacement.
With rising customer expectations increasing the pressure on organisations to improve service levels and efficiency, those who can successfully combine the benefits of intelligent technologies with the unbeatable intuition and empathy of contact centre professionals will be ideally placed to build happier working environments. In doing so, not only will they help address the continuing problems of employee wellbeing and churn, but they also stand to significantly improve the customer experience, and that’s a win-win for everyone involved.
Boost the mood in the office by introducing funny employee awards.
Article by Martin Taylor, Deputy CEO at Content Guru
