Agent performance based on customer feedback: How five brands have done this successfully

As a business owner operating in the competitive digital infrastructure, you can never undermine the value of your customer support desk in shaping your customer’s experience. Behind the phone calls and emails that your contact center makes, there’s a human essence all the time. It is this human element that can deliver a good customer experience or ruin it. 

No wonder the successful brands deploy smart analytics tools to evaluate their customer experience. Based on their feedback, business leaders tweak the facilities and operational infrastructure for their customer support agents.

Now, as a business leader, you must understand the value of employee satisfaction. Do you think your customer support department would be able to deliver the best specimen of experience to your customers if they are unhappy? Or if you fail to facilitate them as they continue assisting your customers? In order to personalize interactions, you need to focus on customer feedback and monitor the operational facilities of your contact center agents.

Here, we are going to explore how five successful brands strategically deployed their customer feedback as an instrument to fine-tune their help deck. Eventually, this benefit passes on to your customers as they get better assistance from your agents when they reach out.

1. Yext: This company ensures performance visibility across their teams

Forward-thinking businesses have realized that the key challenge to obtain customer service data is its inaccessibility at all the levels. Under the traditional business infrastructure, CX insights were available only to the leadership and managerial professionals. Therefore, open tickets were visible only to the frontline employees of an organization.

To break this trend, Yext came up with a significant change in customer data visibility and accessibility. Employees at all levels of the organization had the liberty to view customer feedback. Therefore, when they came across these open tickets, they got to know the actual problems or complaints of their customers.

Besides, Yext deployed dashboards supporting feedback streams in real time. This stream loops in the company leaders, managers, and agents. As a result, the feedback from customers flows through the leaderboards and dashboards. All the agents working with Yext can seamlessly access these details at any time. They also use the Slack channel to share positive feedback and work on the manager roundup emails each week. During their meetings, they share the top comments across the country. As a result, the transparency and dedication of the customer service team become visible to the entire company.

With real-time feedback available, the company has strategised better reward programs and coaching sessions. The CSAT scores reveal that Yext has improved by 8 points. Currently, the average score of the company is more than 90%.

2. Lululemon: Working on coaching and training

Lululemon has shown the way with innovation, coaching, and training its employees. When it comes to training new contact center executives about processes, the task becomes challenging. Understanding the perks and drawbacks of the products takes time. Besides, the customer support agents should understand the voice of the brand and its clients’ expectations.

To facilitate better customer support, Lululemon invested in training programs for the agents. They evaluated customer feedback in real-time for each team to come up with specific programs. As a result, the agents benefitted from the self-correcting nature of these programs. Besides, it enhanced motivation, engagement, and performance of the teams.

After all, feedback proves valuable for businesses. Carefully working on feedback, businesses can capitalize on their opportunities and deliver a better experience to their customers. Prompt action on customer feedback to educate the agents is what helped this company to come up with a robust strategy for customers. No wonder, why other companies should follow suit.

3. FabFitFun: The company that boosted agent motivation

Regardless of how much you invest in training your customer support agents, your clients wouldn’t benefit unless you can motivate them to deliver their optimal best. Feedback from your customers can work as a driving force to the performance of the agents.

This is what FabFitFun banked on, counting on real-time feedback from customers to boost the motivation of their employees. On the second monitor, the agents receive feedback from customers in real time. This direct gratification from the customers motivates employees to work better, drawing lessons from the negative ones.

The strategy goes a long way in carrying out in-moment training. It also drives self-correcting actions, and the agents feel motivated to improve their performances. They have access to feedback data from customers and team leaders. In the process, they can understand their shortcomings and draw motivation to perform better.

4. Birchbox: Taking on negative feedbacks

Well, how about salvaging negative feedback to foster a healthy customer support environment in your organization? For most companies, there’s nothing much to do about negative feedback. However, Birchbox has come up with a strategy that can turn the negative experience around. So, what they do is, they settle the issue directly between customers and improve the feedback.

The role of CX leaders at Birchbox is to flag every negative feedback. Accordingly, they find out whether or not it’s right for them to follow up. The agent would be responsible for dealing with the basic follow-up. However, if the issue is complex, the team leaders need to take on these negative feedbacks. As a result, you make the agents your reps and they learn from the process and don’t repeat the same mistake later.

On the other hand, the customer feels that the company recontacts them and closes the ticket. This fosters a positive sentiment about the company, and they understand the impact. This has helped Birchbox significantly enhance their customer sentiment, SCAT, and internal product innovation.

5. Postmates: Working on product innovation based on customer feedbacks

Postmates has shown how customer feedback not only helps motivating their agents, but also serves as a valuable instrument to shape product development. The customer experience partners, along with their product team, help in making important decisions related to their products based on customer feedback.

The voices of customers tend to be vital as they develop their products to cater to their requirements. Once they analyze their demands based on feedback, they can innovate strategies and products to address their needs.

The front-line team works on product innovation based on customer feedback. The dedicated analytics team helps in evaluating the feedback from their customers, driving measurable improvements. This significantly reduces the cancellations of customers, and they can carry out relevant updates on their products.

Conclusion

Equipping your agents with real-time feedback of the customers, you can significantly enhance their performance. The experience of your agents also becomes gratifying, as they can feel motivated and better-poised to tackle their challenges dealing with customers. Ultimately, it’s your customers who benefit from these strategies.