Contact center agents were put in a difficult position this past year. As companies were faced with high influxes of call volume, an abundance of new customers, and a growing pressure to improve digital channels, they came to rely on their agents to facilitate these interactions and meet growing customer expectations.
With a renewed emphasis on the customer experience, companies are now looking to strengthen their frontline as agents begin to take on a more complex and flexible role in the contact center. To better prepare agents to operate in the continually evolving contact center space, we must work to identify the most successful characteristics and traits of the contact center agent of the future.
CCW Digital’s latest Customer Contact Industry Review Market Study does just this — by effectively uncovering the most essential qualities for customer contact employees moving forward, companies can ensure a successful and agile frontline.
To start, empathy stood out as the most important quality for contact center agents today, with 68% of companies noting that empathy is an essential quality moving forward. CCW Principal Analyst Brian Cantor, notes that true empathy is not always as straightforward as it appears. While many believe that empathy describes warm-hearted conversations or lengthy discussions, it really represents a willingness to adapt and evolve your tone to support and respect the individual you’re interacting with. Therefore, when customers desire a quick and simple resolution, an empathetic reaction would be to recognize this urgency and provide seamless and fast support. Ultimately, an empathetic agent is able to understand customers’ intentions and sentiments and momentarily match their style of support to their preferences.
However, maintaining a warm and inviting tone is still important, and 63% of companies view friendliness and an ability to delight and connect with customers as essential to the agent experience. This makes sense; as customers are increasingly utilizing digital channels to communicate, they are seeking a level of friendly and welcoming conversation when they do choose to interact with an agent.
In addition to being empathetic and friendly, companies ranked comfort communicating in all channels, comfort handling different types of interactions, and comfort with complex products and processes as important to an agent’s success. Brian Cantor notes that each of these qualities is a product of the increasing trend of digital acting as the default preference for modern customers. Therefore, high levels of comfort in both handling interactions and communicating on digital channels are critical in 2021.
Cantor concludes that the agent of the future will increasingly support complex interactions moving forward, and companies must recognize the fact that agents will likely be supporting customers who may have first attempted to solve their issue through self-service measures. Therefore, agents who are able to support with an empathetic and accommodating outlook will be most successful in this new environment. Additionally, agents who can act as a “one-stop-shop” for customers will provide the most seamless experience for customers seeking effortless service.
On the low end, interestingly, companies ranked comfort coming into the physical contact center as least important, with only 23% deeming it essential. This is telling as companies work to establish plans for a hybrid or permanently remote contact center. As customer expectations continue to grow, companies are becoming more flexible in terms of physical location and focusing on traits like empathy and digital savviness to ensure agents are able to facilitate more exceptional and meaningful interactions.
The contact center agent of the future is agile and can adapt to every interaction, regardless of the channel or platform. By leveraging qualities like empathy and preparing agents to take on more complex interactions, companies benefit from a flexible and highly competent frontline.
To learn more about the agent of the future, and gain a greater understanding of what a modern customer-centric experience looks like, download CCW Digital’s latest Customer Contact Industry Review Market Study here.