5 Common Customer Service Agent Frustrations

 

An excellent customer experience is a key to success

If you want to deliver an exceptional customer experience, you need to address the “employee experience”  and eliminate agent frustrations first. Ultimately, the customer experience, services, and support you provide your customers will determine whether they choose you over your competitors and how loyal they are to your brand.

Good experiences can even improve your chances of generating more revenue: 86% of customers say they would happily pay more for a guaranteed good service. But as important as CX is to growing your business, remember that it’s only one piece of the puzzle.

Your employees are ultimately responsible for whether a service experience is good or bad. If your team members are unhappy, frustrated, or overwhelmed at work, they will not deliver outstanding results for customers. Some 70% of executives agree that EX is the key to good CX.

That means if you want to delight your customers, you must first address the problems your support staff face every day.

The Common Agent Frustrations Harming Employee Experience

There are several factors that can contribute to a negative experience for your agents, from too many repetitive tasks to overly complex technology. While the exact issues your team faces can vary, some problems seem to occur more frequently than others.

Below are the TOP 5 agent frustrations they most often complain about, and what you can do about them.

1.     Transferring Customers to New Departments

If there’s one thing customers hate, it’s being passed from one department to another in your organization in search of a solution to their problem. However, it turns out that this problem isn’t only frustrating for your customers, but it’s also problematic for your employees.

When you’ve to refer customers to different employees, it means that employees have to deal with frustrated customers who may have already explained their problem to several people. At the same time, referring a customer to a new employee means your employees are wasting time when they could be meeting their performance goals.

So how can you solve this problem? Simple: improve the way you route customers to your contact center agents. Instead of simply creating a queue and routing customers to the next available agent, make sure your customers are routed directly to the person who can best address their issue. Using AI tools and automated processes, you can gather information about a customer’s concern using natural language processing and then use that data to match the customer to an agent.

Intelligent, skills-based routing should reduce customer churn, increase customer satisfaction, and reduce the low-value tasks your team members complete every day.

 

2.     Dealing with Repetitive Tasks

Countless studies show that today’s employees in all ecosystems are looking for more meaningful, engaging, and satisfying work. Your employees aren’t getting the experience they’re looking for when they’re busy doing things like manually entering data or sending endless, repetitive emails.

Mundane and repetitive tasks drain your resources. They rob employees of valuable time that could be used to improve customer satisfaction. To make matters worse, these tasks often lead to unhappy and disengaged employees, which can increase employee turnover.

The best way to solve this problem is to reduce the number of mundane tasks your employees have to complete. With automation tools, you can quickly and easily reduce the low-value work that consumes your team members’ energy. You can use simple tools for everything from transcribing calls to making sure the right information is updated in your CRM system.

By reducing the unnecessary tasks your employees waste their time on, they can focus on more meaningful tasks. The result is happier employees and higher customer satisfaction.

 

3.     Lack of Information or Context

One of the reasons customers often hate being bounced back and forth between different channels and agents in the contact center is that they often have to repeat information about the problem they’ve already explained. This not only wastes your customers’ time but also that of your employees, who’ve to spend more time getting to the bottom of the problem instead of solving it.

To improve customer service in the modern world, companies need to provide their customers with a truly optimized omnichannel experience. This means they can move back and forth between different channels and agents without having to repeat themselves to different professionals.

To provide your agents with the information and context they need to be successful in their roles, you should deploy the right automated assistants. Tools like AI virtual assistants and automated apps can bring the context of conversations on multiple channels directly to your employees’ screens as soon as they answer a call or message. You can also create a single pane of glass environment for all your communication channels, where agents can track every conversation.

Giving your agents a complete view of the customer’s journey, their previous interactions with the brand, the products they’ve purchased, and more allow them to act immediately. This means agents spend less time researching and asking questions, and more time getting results.

 

4.     Poor-Quality Self-Service Solutions

It’s no secret that self-service is becoming an increasingly popular tool in the contact center. With the right tools, you can free up your staff by giving customers the ability to serve themselves. These solutions also empower customers and prevent them from spending unnecessary time in call and message queues.

The problem is that many old-fashioned self-service solutions aren’t nearly as effective as they should be. That means your customers are frustrated and annoyed when they finally call or contact an agent, and they’re generally harder to deal with. Companies that want to take advantage of self-service need to make sure they have the right systems in place to optimize service.

Using contextual self-service solutions equipped with AI and natural language processing can be a great solution. These tools can better understand customers’ needs and guide them to the right solution on the first try. At the same time, AI solutions can also relay information gathered during the self-service journey to an agent when the issue needs to be escalated.

At the same time, a better self-service solution reduces the workload of your agents by reducing the number of calls and messages that need to be handled and increasing customer satisfaction.

5.     Lack of Training and Guidance

The world of customer service is becoming increasingly complex. Today’s agents must deal with increasingly sophisticated customers across a greater number of channels. In addition, they often need to remain productive in multiple environments thanks to the rise of hybrid work.

To stay ahead in this environment, agents need consistent support through professional development, cross-skilling, and training initiatives. Teaching agents to use automated diagnostic and troubleshooting tools or proactive service management technologies can help them perform their jobs more efficiently.

At the same time, training on how to communicate with customers, resolve issues and improve customer service can ensure employees are better prepared to handle difficult situations. Well-trained team members are more confident and empowered in their roles, which leads to higher employee satisfaction.

In addition, trained employees are more likely to resolve customer issues quickly, which means they won’t have to deal with frustrated, dissatisfied customers.

 

Address the Agent Frustrations

Customer service representatives are one of the most important resources in any business. They’re the face of your business when it comes to building customer loyalty and satisfaction. Failing to address their experiences and needs can cause significant problems for businesses.

By implementing the right technology, conducting the right training, and developing the right policies for your agents, you can simultaneously improve EX and CX for your brand. Contact Bulb Tech today to learn more about how you can tackle your agents’ biggest areas of agent frustrations.