Improve Customer Support Agent Productivity

If you are focusing on improving the customer experience, there is nothing more important than improving customer support agent productivity. While the softer aspects of empowerment, focus et al are important for productivity, there are some fundamental shifts that are essential to make the process scalable.

So, let us see the four unconventional ways you can improve customer support agent productivity:

Tip # 1 – Structure your customer support data

How will the agent productivity go up if we structure the data? Here is how. Most of the agents spend a lot of time reading the support email, categorizing them under specific sections and then thinking about the appropriate response.

Once you structure the customer support data, you can easily automate the entire process of reading and categorizing the support emails by effectively using the keywords and some advanced algorithms. Structuring and automating the data would completely eliminate the time the agents would spend on reading and allocating emails. See our survey for more details.

Tip # 2 – Create Customer Support Knowledgebase

Once you structure your customer support data, the next step is to create the knowledge base for insights. Analysing what customers are reaching out for and how agents are responding is extremely critical to design the right support services workflows, triggers, alerts, etc. You can use this information to create insights and automate a part of customer responses. Not just that, you can even pre-empt certain support calls by proactively sending information to the customers.

The key here is to have a solid knowledge base and insights derived from the customer support data. These insights will enable your agents to cross-sell and up-sell rather than answering the routine questions.

Tip # 3 – Find the agent skill gap

We normally look at agent KPIs, such as customer support calls/emails taken, issues resolved to measure the agent productivity. Use analytics to get the real data behind the agent-skill gap. Analysing the support call records will help you understand the inaccurate/unclear responses that are leading to multiple interactions with the same client. Finding this gap will help immensely in cutting down the slack and lack of knowledge in each agent making them even more productive.

Tip # 4 – Automate. Cut down on the manual process

We have seen in all of the above examples that the routine and manual process is the key reason for the dropping productivity rates of customer support agents. Manual processes, such as reading support requests, allocating, responding are huge bottlenecks in the entire workflow and lead to the excess need for agent hours, long turnaround times, etc.

We have seen that automation typically reduces the turnaround times by over 20% and reduce the support costs by over 30%. Importantly, it allows you to consistently predict and respond to the customers and deliver a superior experience that can outclass your competition.

Talk to us if you want to see a quick demo of our suite of customer support analytics and automation tools specifically designed for improving agent productivity, improving your issue resolution rates, and offering predictive support.