Is Voice of the Agent the missing link in your CX program?

For many organisations, the contact centre remains the most important customer touchpoint. With the rapid onset of remote working and the subsequent shift to e-commerce, contact centre agents are often the only true experience drivers with which customers will interact. Contact centre agents often represent the beating heart of a company’s customer experience.

Capturing Voice-of-the-Customer (VoC) feedback after agent interactions is a critical requirement for any business that is serious about providing a good quality customer experience. This type of high-volume VoC feedback generates insights that, for example, can uncover root cause of customer journey pain points, identify opportunities for product improvement, and highlight areas of needed coaching for better agent performance.

Combined with this, an important but oft-overlooked benefit of such programmes is the ability to blend VoC and contact centre performance data. For example, operational metrics such as call-handling, service level, and ticket-resolution time generate insights and analytics that provide a holistic view of the experiences provided to your customers by the contact centre. Teams can use the insights from this blended data to set better operational KPIs, and more effectively allocate resources.

But many organisations are missing out on another stream of valuable CX insights, called the Voice-of-the-Agent (VoA). VoA can be a crucial feedback and improvement stream for customer experience programmes, as well as helping generate a more motivated, connected and ultimately more customer-focused team of agents. An ideal VoA programme involves weekly agent pulse-checks, asking agents to provide candid feedback on whether they are adequately enabled to support good customer experiences and to highlight key areas of customer pain points. Not only does this provide actionable insight into how to improve the customer experience, but it also provides a feeling of value to your agents, and we’ve seen this result in reduced agent attrition rates with our clients.

Here are three important reasons why VoA is an excellent source of CX insights: 

Agents are on the front-line, every day dealing with a considerable number of customer interactions, which generally means they learn about emerging problems before other parts of the business realise that challenges are emerging. Tapping into this early warning data source provides an opportunity to take corrective action and better control the spread of customer experience damage.

2. An understanding of customer pain-points and how they can be fixed 

Agents understand, better than anyone, what customers are asking for and what’s missing from the current environment across products, services and processes that would improve customer relations. This grass root insight can be invaluable when implementing product and process changes.

By asking agents what things your organisation can do to help them provide a better customer experience, you can unlock a wealth of helpful improvement programmes for your organisation. Initiatives such as more training or coaching, hardware equipment, better-designed workflows to match customer requests, unnecessarily complicated procedures or policies are all examples of areas that might be fixable with relatively simple changes.

Voice of the Agent adds a valuable data set to your contact centre VoC programme. To learn more about the benefits of such a solution and how to implement it within your environment, contact us today.