S3 Ep. 5 Using tech to retain, support and train agents

David Wasserman (03:45): 

It’s interesting to hear that people are now more concerned about recruiting than retention, which has been an ongoing problem. But I think CX leaders still need to focus on how to retain these employees. I would say more generally, it’s about being empathetic to employees, to their needs, and designing the work, the environment, and the technology around them, their role and, what you need them to do — which is providing great CX to customers.  

David Wasserman (05:18): 

Remote work and hybrid work are certainly very important. But, also, how the technology’s interacting with these people as they’re doing the job, whether it’s scheduling and forecasting systems that provide new ways of working, like a split shift. Maybe it’s ways to interact with the scheduling system while on the go in real time. And around performance management — looking at people as people and understanding what’s important to them. Those are ways that technology can play a role in retaining people.  

David Wasserman (08:06): 

Before I jump into the solutions…. From a technology perspective, we need to understand who the right people are. Not everyone’s fit for these types of roles.  

But once you understand who those people are through things like performance management, you’ll get a better sense who you can put in that lane. You’re always going to need people in a contact center to do certain types of work, including the mundane work. We talk about robots and front ends that’ll allow self-service, but sometimes people need to talk to people. That’s a fact.  

So, I think there are things that can be transitioned to a bot, but sometimes people will still need to be there to send you your new membership card because the bot couldn’t figure it out.  

David Wasserman (10:08): 

There are many tasks that can be automated. There are many tasks where an agent can be prompted with an answer that can help them through complex questions, guiding them with knowledge management that’s intuitive, that’s AI driven, that’s giving them the possible best three answers, not necessarily the exact answer. Because even with smart technology, humans need to make the connection. Humans understand the relationships between a question and an answer. What is that customer really looking for? Some questions are more than just words. They’re emotions that AI will not understand.  

David Wasserman (12:25): 

The way we interact with each other through social media and text messaging and gaming, all those things can be transferred into the business world, and in this case, the contact center. One of them is gamification: How do we create an experience for the agent that’s not only engaging to them and engaging with the customer too, but also engaging with their peers? And how do we create an experience where it’s one team and it feels like that in a virtual world. We need to take these things from the physical world and very effectively put them into the virtual world.  

David Wasserman (14:34): 

One thing we all like to avoid is call friction. When you think about an agent’s job in interacting with customers, there’s multitasking, and then there’s multitasking that’s over the top. In the contact center, our ability to provide an environment that’s no different than you operate in the real world — with two eyes looking forward — is what’s required to make successful agent.  

David Wasserman (16:06): 

As it relates to contact center agents, it’s using performance management tools as they’ve been designed. I think what’s happened over the years is, despite improvements in technology and ways that managers can interact with their employees, people just don’t like to [follow the processes in those tools]. What I would suggest is people just go with it. These tools are designed by people that are studying this. They understand what actually works, what’s effective. So, allow yourself to let go. Immerse yourself in the technology, follow the process, that will have big results for contact center agents in managing their performance.  

David Wasserman (19:23): 

I agree. In general, I would say that computing is helping employees do a better job of being contact center agents, which is serving customers; it’s helping them focus on the human element of the job. These technologies eliminate a lot of those rote tasks and allow people to focus on complex tasks, those things that only a human can serve.  

David Wasserman (21:45): 

There are three things that people should be thinking about. One, is the way we operate in our personal lives is well beyond where we currently are in our business lives. And I think grabbing on to those methods, those things that we’re doing every day as individuals.  

The second thing is really understanding people’s innate skills and core values. Not everyone’s the right person for every job. It’s really looking at your employee set and figuring out where they best fit — and being empathetic and understanding employees and their needs. 

The last thing is leveraging data. When we talk about AI, we talk about computing, that’s data. So, how do we automate the things we can automate? How do we help people do their job by leveraging data to make them more informed and make smarter decisions in the process of providing customer service?  

David Wasserman (24:53): 

When you understand exactly what agents should be doing in your contact center, it’ll be obvious. And the result is they’ll be happy in their role, and they won’t be turning over. That’s for sure.