Contact center technology investments to improve the agent experience

The article has been updated from a previous version published in May 2021.

As the main point of contact with the customer, contact center agents must exude warmth, assess needs, answer questions, and ultimately leave the customer with a fantastic impression of a business and brand. But with high call volumes and often frustrated customers, these aren’t easy tasks. And if agents lack the technology to do their jobs effectively, then leaving customers with a positive impression can be nearly impossible. 

Fortunately, equipping contact center agents with the tools they need has never been more accessible. Investing in contact center technology, and specifically agent enablement tools can vastly improve the agent experience so they can deliver the personalized and efficient experiences customers expect.

7 agent enablement tools to improve the employee experience

Exceptional customer experiences are inextricably linked with strong employee experiences – you can’t have one without the other. With agent enablement solutions, businesses can simplify and streamline agents’ workload, giving them more time to focus on high-quality, memorable interactions with customers.

Here are seven agent enablement tools to that will boost employee effectiveness, efficiency, and productivity.

1. The basics: contact center hardware and software requirements

Ultimately, your goal should be to create a modern and secure omnichannel experience. Before you can start optimizing your contact center solution, you should make sure that your agents have all the essentials at their fingertips. The basics include high-quality and reliable internet, headsets, laptops, desktops and VPN.

2. Customer relationship management (CRM)

As you strive to provide a customer-centric experience, your customer relationship management solution should always be at the heart of your strategy. With a strong CRM platform, your contact center agents will be able to access the full range of client details within a few clicks, ensuring that they have both historical records and the most up-to-the-minute data on your customers.

3. Softphone integration

Make the customer experience seamless by allowing your agents to manage calls directly within the agent interface. By embedding communications within your software, you will improve the experience for your agents, helping them answer more customer inquiries during the day, via both voice and chat.

4. Sentiment analysis

By monitoring feedback across your customer segments, you can work toward providing a better customer experience than ever before. Your team can use this feature to monitor a specific issue or product line for an in-depth assessment of customer satisfaction. Sentiment analysis is key to enabling your agents to make incremental improvements to the service they provide to your customers. One example of conducting sentiment analysis is through Voice of the Customer programs, which help you better identify your customers’ needs and expectations, avoid brand-wide issues, and strategize new products, services, or processes.

5. Knowledge management system 

When contact center agents need to find answers to customer questions, those answers should be easy and intuitive to find. With generative AI added to a knowledge management system, agents can ask conversational questions, which helps them deliver the right answers to customers more quickly. 

6. Workforce management (WFM)

Operational efficiency is key to your profit margins, and workforce management makes it so much easier. With WFM, you can ensure the right number of agents are always on hand to take care of expected call volumes. A WFM solution can forecast your requirements, and then schedule the agents best suited to take on the expected workload. When you properly manage your agent population, agent satisfaction increases because they aren’t understaffed, overloaded with calls, or sitting idle with no work to do. And ultimately, happier agents deliver better customer experiences.

7. Customer assist solutions 

Time is money, both for you and your customers, so getting them to the right place efficiently is crucial. With a virtual agent, IVR, or chatbot, you can automate parts of your customer service journey to provide customers with the answers they need in a timely manner while freeing agents up to focus on more complex customer inquiries. 

Customer satisfaction starts with agent satisfaction

Contact center technology has the power to transform the experience of both your agents and your customers — two sides of the same coin. If you improve the solutions available to your agents, happier customers will follow. By combining the right mix of tools in a cohesive, integrated way, you can achieve the customer experience that your business needs to get to the next level.