Understanding the customer service agent experience and its impact on customers
Creating great customer experiences starts with the agents who support your customers every day. Agents can’t create great customer experiences (CX) without organizational support, the right technology, workload balance, management feedback, and time to reflect on their performance. Likewise, they shouldn’t have to battle with unhelpful tools or spend extra time searching for answers to customers’ questions. Continued improvement to agent experiences is a cornerstone to making exceptional customer experiences.
How exactly are organizations supporting their agents? What tools and feedback are they armed with to do their jobs effectively and efficiently? For organizations developing their CX technology strategies, what takeaways can they gather from other organizations further along in their respective CX strategies? To answer these questions and more, Webex by Cisco partnered with CMSWire to conduct an “Improving Customer Service Agent Experiences” survey.
We asked over 600 managers, directors, and senior leaders for insight into how organizations support their customer service agents, where they plan investments to improve the agent experience, and where gaps still exist. All agree that good customer service experiences are critical to organizations, and that most companies recognize the impact agent experiences have on customer experiences. The study showed the quality of agent support and the balancing of agent workloads are improved in organizations with more mature customer service technology strategies. And the more advanced the strategy, the more the organization plans to invest in advancing its customer services technology. These findings indicate investments in customer service technology, tools, and platforms have been successful and deemed worthy for continuous improvements.
If your organization doesn’t have a centralized strategy for customer service technology, the greatest thing you can do to support your customer service agents is develop a strategy. Well-placed technology and tools can provide significant support to your customer service agents, making them more effective and able to provide excellent service to your customers.
Research conducted by