According to an IDC study, “Fortune 500 companies lose at least $31.5 billion a year by failing to share knowledge.”
In the world of customer support, creating impeccable experiences is the name of the game. One key player in this arena is Agent Experience (AX). But challenges like rigorous training, endless calls, etc., are throwing your support agents off their game, messing up the whole customer experience.
Enter the “agent empowerment index” – a pivotal metric to turning things around. In this blog post, we’ll dig into what’s messing with your agents, and explore how it wrecks CX. Let’s begin.
What is the Agent Empowerment Index?
In the demanding realm of customer support, metrics like first contact resolution (FCR) and time to resolution (TTR) dominate discussions, all from a customer-centric perspective. But at times, the unsung hero is overlooked.
Agent Empowerment Index addresses the root causes of low agent productivity and related challenges.
Unleashing Support Excellence with Agent Empowerment Index
AEI is the secret sauce, focusing on providing agents with the tools, training, and a supportive environment essential for optimal performance. By balancing qualitative and quantitative aspects, AEI sets the stage for a host of benefits. Let’s dive into a few:
1. Enhanced Agent Performance
Empowered agents exhibit heightened job satisfaction and confidence, translating into improved performance metrics. When they are provided with the right tools and guidance, navigating complex inquiries becomes much easier and more efficient. As a result, it contributes to faster issue resolution and overall customer satisfaction.
2. Higher Employee Retention
Focusing on AEI ensures that agents feel valued and respected within the workplace. This definitely boosts morale, while even helping you lower attrition rates.
Now, isn’t that a win-win considering you wouldn’t be on the constant lookout for skilled agents to replace the ones who left? Not to forget the training costs and time spent on onboarding new support agents.
3. Strategic Decision Making
Understanding the challenges and pain points faced by agents provides valuable insights for strategic decision-making. AEI acts as a key tool for identifying areas that require improvement, enabling organizations to make informed decisions that positively impact both agent performance and customer satisfaction.
4. Continuous Improvement
Let’s circle back to the part where we talked about providing your agents with the necessary tools for optimum customer satisfaction. Tools that focus on knowledge management and providing constant, real-time support ensure that whenever an agent hits a wall, there are necessary resources to help them out.
This focuses on present and future upskilling as the agents feel empowered to take on more responsibilities and challenges.
…and these are some of the benefits of focusing on AEI. However, like bread and butter, these advantages are only prominent when agents have the tools to facilitate them.
Boosting AEI with the Right Approach & Technology
Now, let’s talk about the tools and technology required to boost AEI. Consider integrating the following into your support toolbox:
A Cognitive Search Platform
Implementing a robust search platform is like killing two birds with one stone in the world of support. First, it is the perfect gateway for customers to self-serve.
According to a report, 81% of customers expressed their desire for more self-service options.
Consecutively, it empowers agents to quickly and easily locate the information they need to solve cases, eliminating unnecessary hold-ups.
Customer Sentiment Score
A customer sentiment score is a quantified measure of customer sentiment, ranging from positive to negative, regarding a product or service in this case. Say, a live agent is working on a case and has access to the customer’s sentiment score.
In case the score is below average, the case should get flagged as a priority. Therefore, it is important to have a reliable tool that can gauge the sentiment score in real-time.
GenAI-powered Virtual Assistant
Virtual assistants (VA) are the go-to for most support centers for their ability to handle textual and transactional queries. However, LLM-powered VAs can do much more, such as helping a new employee through onboarding, scheduling meetings, etc.
The key lies in finding a VA that fits your requirements, for instance, your goal might be to reduce the average TTR.
Quick Capture of Resolved Cases
Maintaining a knowledge base (KB) is crucial to ensuring support operations run smoothly. Imagine support agent A goes to the organization’s existing KB to find a solution to a complex issue, while the customer waits. Unbeknownst to A, support agent B has already worked on this query.
However, B did not have the bandwidth to document the case and later forgot. This resulted in knowledge loss, and when the information was required, there was no way for A to access it. Thus, quick capture of resolved cases is crucial to maintaining support quality.
Intelligent Swarming to Save Time
Intelligent swarming is a collaborative support model that dynamically connects individuals with varying expertise to efficiently resolve complex issues.
Let’s revisit the above scenario once again. In a situation where a complex support ticket comes through and gets assigned to A. As agent B has already worked on the exact same case, they can be referred to as the subject matter expert (SME) here.
So when A starts working on a resolution and notices that they need some input from their fellow agents, intelligent swarming ensures that they get routed to the right person. In this case, the agent dealing with the customer does not change and only collaborates with someone with the necessary knowledge.
This ensures:
- Agent A does not have to explain the customer’s issue from scratch while keeping them on hold, increasing the TTR.
- Automatic routing to the experienced agent saves time as opposed to figuring out who would be the best option for an SME.
These are some crucial points to consider when building the perfect tech stack for a support team. But if you’re unsure where to find reliable tools for the same, allow me to suggest something.
Boosting AEI with SearchUnify
SearchUnify is a unified cognitive platform that ensures all your support touchpoints are fueled with the goodness of AI and to that only the highest quality service is provided to your customers.
Take a glimpse into SearchUnify products:
- Cognitive Search: Powered by the goodness of AI and Machine Learning (ML), SearchUnify ensures relevant and contextual results for every query.
- SUVA: SearchUnify Virtual Assistant is the world’s first federated retrieval augmented generation (FRAG™) conversational AI solution. It delivers intent-based and contextual conversations like no other.
- Knowbler: Making it simpler than ever to empower agents through auto case creation and knowledge sharing, Knowbler utilizes cutting-edge ML algorithms at its core.
- Escalation Predictor: Tap into crucial insights and figure out the root cause for escalations. Escalation Predictor facilitates proactive support through customer sentiment analysis.
- Agent Helper: Deliver unmatched support experiences with shortened resolution times and agent support with the help of intelligent swarming- a key feature of Agent Helper.
Ready to Unlock a New World of Support?
SearchUnify is a platform that enables support agents to put their best foot forward by empowering them with the right tools and technology.
If you would like to experience the smoothest ticket resolutions while also ensuring agent satisfaction, take the demo today.
