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7 tips to improve agent productivity
October 09, 2024 • 7 minutes
Consumers have higher expectations than ever. Seventy-three percent say they are more critical of how businesses interact with them than they were just a year ago, while two in three say long hold times matter more to them this year than they did a year ago. In other words: every second counts.
Contact center agents are the first line of defense — and their productivity directly impacts customer satisfaction and loyalty. But even highly skilled agents will struggle to be productive if they don’t have the right coaching, processes, and tools.
In this blog, we’ll look at tips to optimize processes, coaching techniques, and AI tools that can significantly enhance agent performance while helping contact centers meet the rising expectations of today’s consumers.
How to improve agent productivity and deliver exceptional customer service
1. Provide better training and assessment
According to McKinsey, it takes about six to nine months for new customer service agents to perform at the level of their more tenured teammates. With generative AI’s ability to help agents easily access a huge library of interventions and scripts, they’re seeing that time cut down to three months in certain cases.
The onboarding and training process is key to helping agents hit the ground running, and is the best early opportunity to empower them with the knowledge, scripts, and tools they need to handle a wide range of customer interactions confidently.
To encourage more efficient agents, assessment is key — but evaluation is typically a manual task that can easily take up hours of managers’ and coaches’ time each week depending on the sizes of the teams they oversee. AI can help speed up this task through automation.
For example, using LivePerson’s chatbot builder, you can easily design an internal-facing AI agent to measure agent productivity. It can evaluate your agents’ abilities by asking a series of targeted questions that assess agents’ comprehension, response formulation, and typing skills, all within an efficient 60-90 second window. This helps drive and prove the success of your training efforts by providing consistent, objective assessments in an automated way, which is essential as your team scales up and as the number and complexity of customer interactions increases.
2. Implement a unified agent workspace
To truly offer seamless omnichannel experiences, you need customer service software or tools that allow your agents to manage customer conversations on all channels.
A unified agent workspace integrates all the tools, data, and communication channels an agent needs into a single interface. This way, when an agent encounters customer inquiries, the knowledge management system can automatically provide the right content or script to help the agent — within the same interface.
It’s a powerful agent productivity tool that streamlines operations, reduces cognitive load, and reduces training costs and operational complexity.
With LivePerson’s Conversational Cloud® platform, agents can handle both voice and messaging interactions in the same platform, ensuring a consistent experience for customers across channels. The unified workspace is also equipped with AI-powered tools to help agents deliver more personalized service at scale such as AI agent assist, sentiment analysis, and automated summaries.
3. Streamline conversations with more efficient routing
Not every customer interaction needs direct agent involvement, and offloading some of these conversations can free customer support agents up to focus on more critical issues — while reducing wait times.
This is why routing customers to the right person or bot is so important to improve agent productivity.
LivePerson’s Routing AI agent, for example, leverages generative AI to automatically direct customers to the most suitable resource for their questions, whether that’s an AI agent, human agent, or bot.
This eliminates the confusion and frustration often associated with complex IVR menus, and ensures efficient, intelligent routing across both messaging and voice channels.
4. Make it easy for agents to access the content they need
Many companies accumulate numerous pieces of PDC (Pre-Defined Content) across many different systems like CRMs, CMSs, and internal documents over time, which makes it difficult for agents to efficiently navigate and find specific content.
There are a few ways to alleviate this. LivePerson’s KnowledgeAI™, for example, connects and ingests all these knowledge sources and systems to ground its generative AI features in your unique, brand-specific data. It can pull from any system instantly, and even automatically detects redundant information to ensure agents can quickly and confidently find the required information — without having to search every system manually.
5. Empower agents with self-service options and tools
From an agent perspective, one of the most impactful tools companies across different industries already use is generative AI.
Say a customer asks an agent: “Sounds interesting. If I activate this offer today, will it apply to the purchase I made this morning?”
A question like this requires your agents to be up-to-date on the ins and outs of every offering — not easy to do when you have a wide range of products and seasonal discounts, even for the most experienced agents.
Generative AI can help the agent with both information retrieval and crafting the response. For example, LivePerson’s generative AI agent assist tool, Copilot, comes with three features that empower agents to answer every question quickly and accurately when the conversation gets escalated to them:
- Summary – First, Copilot Summary equips your agent with a summary of the customer’s previous conversation with the bot.
- Assist – Then, Copilot Assist provides the agent with LLM-powered recommendations to help them answer the question correctly without needing to escalate or get help from supervisors.
- Rewrite – Lastly, Copilot Rewrite helps the agent by using generative AI to craft or suggest polished responses to the customer.
6. Automate FAQs to reduce agent load
If your agents are spending a significant amount of time answering repetitive questions, you can improve the team’s productivity (and agent satisfaction) by strategically implementing customer-facing bots that handle simple, routine questions.
These bots can be designed to address common customer inquiries such as order status, password resets, or basic troubleshooting, which generally take up a large portion of customer support agents’ time. This not only helps improve agent productivity, but also enhances digital customer experiences by accelerating resolution times.
The RealReal, the world’s largest and most trusted resource for authenticated luxury resale, did exactly this. Integrating their CRM with LivePerson’s Conversational Cloud platform, they built bots that made it easier and faster for members to get information on commonly asked topics like order tracking and receipts.
7. Fully integrate your tech stack
According to Gartner, 47% of digital workers struggle to find the information or data required to effectively perform their jobs. And the average desk worker uses 11 applications.
An integrated tech stack is vital for agent efficiency because it reduces the amount of constant back-and-forth tab switching that agents have to do, and also makes it easier for them to access data in a single place.
For example, Wayfair, one of the world’s largest furniture and home décor providers, found that their agents were having trouble accessing customer data when they needed it.
The reason: this data was buried deep in their phone system.
After they integrated Salesforce, their CRM, with their contact center platform, they were able to empower agents with relevant context — while they were talking to customers. In just six months after integrating their tools, Wayfair saw an increase in agent productivity that was equivalent to gaining 38 employees.
Unlock agent productivity today with LivePerson
From leveraging generative AI tools to providing agents with unified workspaces for a more positive work environment — that gives them all the information they need in one place — there are many ways to empower your contact center team to operate more efficiently.
Learn more about LivePerson’s Conversational Cloud platform and how companies across every major industry are using it to improve agent productivity and inspire a contact center transformation.
