Customer service agents are the backbone of your call center. When your customers contact your business, it’s most likely because something has gone wrong. Agents can right that wrong and change the course of a potentially negative experience–or they can make the situation worse if they approach the interaction with apathy or cannot help the customer.
4 benefits of investing in the call center employee experience
A positive agent experience ripples across the organization and out to your customers. Below are a few of the biggest benefits of investing in your call center employee experience.
Increased customer satisfaction
Happier agents mean happier customers. Research, including a large-scale Glassdoor study, has found a strong correlation between employee well-being and customer satisfaction. The connection makes sense, especially for frontline employees. Treating your agents well increases job satisfaction, meaning agents are more motivated to deliver excellent customer service.
Improved confidence in customer conversations
Customers remember interactions with particularly helpful agents–and interactions with agents who seemed apathetic or powerless to help. Those experiences can make or break their decision to buy from your business again. A 2024 survey of U.S. consumers found the top three reasons customers report continuing to buy from a business after a service interaction all relate to how they perceive the agent they spoke to (the employee was 1. helpful, 2. knowledgeable, and 3. friendly). Conversely, 81% of consumers said they would likely leave a brand if an employee was rude or apathetic.
Agents are more confident and helpful when their organization gives them the tools and training to succeed, and customers can tell.
Reduction in call center operational costs
Focusing on employee well-being and training helps agents work more efficiently, which positively impacts several key call center metrics.
Empowered agents are more successful in resolving customer issues, leading to lower transfer rates, shorter hold times, and a higher first-call resolution rate. And while a short average handle time isn’t always a measure of success, especially in industries with complex customer service interactions, agents with the right tools and training can reduce time spent on unnecessary AHT drivers, such as hunting down information in a knowledge base or running a question up the chain. These improvements reduce overall operational costs, allowing businesses to invest more budget back into their employee and customer experiences.
Decreased turnover and hiring costs
Call center turnover rates are notoriously high, and the cost of exiting agents adds up. Gallup estimates that it costs about one-half an entry-level employee’s annual salary to replace them.
It’s not just the costs of recruiting, hiring, and onboarding that call centers must consider. High employee turnover negatively impacts overall productivity and the morale of remaining agents, which can in turn negatively impact customer service interactions and increase the risk of customer churn.
The happier an agent is in their role, the more likely they are to stay at your call center. Your business benefits from reduced turnover costs, and customers benefit from more tenured agents who can efficiently resolve complex issues.
How to improve the employee experience with call center technology
Working as a call center agent can be stressful, especially when agents feel like they don’t have the necessary training, tools, or autonomy to resolve customer issues or grow in their roles. It’s no wonder the average annual attrition rate is close to 40% in the call center industry.
If your call center agents are burning out and churning at high rates, it’s time to refocus on your employee experience. There's no single strategy that’s a magic bullet for improving the agent experience, but the right technology can help you empower your agents and alleviate stress.
We’ve seen many of our customers combine our conversation intelligence and real-time agent guidance software to drive ongoing employee experience improvements. Here’s the approach they take:
Listen to customer conversations at scale
Your contact center conversations contain valuable insights about the agent and customer experience–you just have to listen.
Conversation intelligence software enables call centers to listen to 100% of their customer conversations while decreasing the time they spend on manual QA. Using this technology to evaluate your conversations at scale gives you an unbiased, holistic view of agent performance. It lets managers track each agent and team’s overall performance and provide fair, specific feedback for improvement.
Understand what’s happening in customer-agent interactions
Conversation intelligence software can inform your understanding of what is happening in customer-agent interactions. Analyzing the language customers and agents use in their conversations can help you answer questions like:
- What are the top reasons customers are contacting your business?
- What are the top issues leading to repeat contacts?
- What issues are your agents finding the most challenging to resolve?
- How are specific agent behaviors impacting the customer experience?
- What other controllable factors are negatively impacting the customer or agent experience?
Once you have this information, you can start making meaningful improvements to your processes, training, and real-time agent guidance (which leads to the next step).
Act on opportunities to improve the employee experience
Conversation insights help you prioritize and get buy-in for the initiatives that will have the biggest impact on your employee (and customer) experience. Insights-driven actions may include:
Making updates to your real-time agent guidance.
Real-time agent guidance software simplifies workflows by bringing all the information agents need into a single interface and dynamically walking them through processes. Conversation insights help you continually optimize your real-time scripts and workflows. For example, you might discover friction points in certain workflows that could be eliminated by adding or removing a step, or by making a few small edits to your scripts.
Making process improvements to reduce effort and call volumes.
Trends in your contact center conversations can reveal where certain processes are breaking down. For example, you might discover a large volume of customers are expressing frustration because they couldn’t find the information they were looking for in your knowledge base, or you might find a large volume of your repeat calls are driven by agents setting the wrong expectations about next steps.
Working cross-functionally to improve the customer journey.
The issues your customers contact you about rarely originate in the call center. Addressing the root causes of product or service issues can reduce your call volume, giving your agents more time to focus on the inquiries or issues they’re best equipped to resolve.
You can use conversation intelligence software to track and quantify mentions of product defects, website or app issues, and other friction points governed by other teams. You can then share customer feedback with the appropriate team leaders and even quantify the service cost of the issue, making a strong case for these leaders to prioritize resolving it.
Refining your approach to agent coaching
When you understand what your agents are doing well and where they’re struggling, you can provide targeted coaching and set data-backed, measurable goals. You can also evaluate performance at the team level and uncover opportunities for focal point sprints: team-wide initiatives to improve on a specific behavior or goal during a set period.
Using conversation data to inform your coaching helps agents understand that they’re being evaluated on their entire performance–not how they did on a random sampling of calls. It also allows your agents to grow professionally. Data-backed goals give them room to improve and create clear criteria for bonuses or promotions.
A better customer experience starts with a better employee experience
As a call center leader, it can often feel like there are competing priorities to increase efficiency and improve the quality of the customer experience. However, if you focus on driving a positive employee experience, you can increase both efficiency and quality.
By using conversation intelligence, you can track trends in customer needs and agent behaviors. You can identify the biggest opportunities your agents have to improve the customer experience, then feed that information back into your real-time agent guidance platform. This gives your agents the information they need to resolve customer issues efficiently, allowing them to reduce effort—for themselves and the customer.
This blog post is adapted from a section of our eBook, “Simplify your agent experience to deliver for your customers.”
You can get the full eBook here.
