Improve your agent workspace to to eventually benefit your customers

As a business owner, it’s natural to remain obsessed with your growth trajectory. As you scale up your business, you should be well-poised to respond to the queries of your customers. Well, this is a good sign for your business. However, have you considered the pressure this would exert on your customer support team? 

A foolproof and robust customer support desk defines their ease of handling the enquiries of potential customers. With customer engagement rates shooting sharply, 70% of agents feel overwhelmed with queries pouring in.

The secret to assure satisfaction for your clients starts with equipping your agents with the right technology. Investing in the right customer support tools, you can make your agents better poised to mitigate the challenges. After all, investing in infrastructure development to ensure faster and more intuitive communication matters.

Prioritizing the mental health of your agents

Compared to the previous year, customer engagement rates increased by 30% across the world. Wouldn’t your support agents be fatigued by this continual surge in enquiries? Besides, around half the support teams for global forms operate remotely. So, what do you think is the best approach to assure proper support to your customers?

The process starts with improving the work environment and infrastructure at your organization. This will enhance the mental health conditions of the customer support agents. With better mental conditions, they would be proactive to serve your customers better. Particularly, the Zoom fatigue of your agents is one of the priorities to address.

Whether your customer support teams work from the office or home, it pays to support them technologically. For instance, an omnichannel approach would help them address the needs of customers much better.

Another statistic reveals that only 54% of customer support agents lack the right set of tools to operate remotely. Besides, when they work at home, they have other domestic challenges to consider. This, eventually, takes a toll on their physical and mental health conditions. Unless business owners are proactive enough to identify these problems and support the agents with adequate resources, customers would continue to suffer.

Even when support teams work remotely, they sustain on shared knowledge and collaboration. Unless they stay connected and have the right set of tools at their disposal, they would fail to transfer the corresponding benefits to your clients.

Prime challenges that your customers face

Here are the key challenges that your customer support agents might be encountering.

•   41% of customer support agents report that changes in customer expectation happen to be the biggest challenge
•   31% of the agents state that they receive different queries from the customers than expected
•   28% of customer support agents complain of longer working hours
•   26% think that the expectations of their leadership have changed
•   16% of the customer support agents state that they communicate through different channels

How to enhance customer relationships by empowering your agents?

Addressing issues like the mental health of your customer support agents is a necessity. Every business, for its own interest, must prioritize this mental health. When you ensure the best working conditions for your agents, they would be willing to give their best to customers. Several researches have revealed that happy employees willingly work better for their organizations. Therefore, it’s time to address the challenges that your agents are encountering in the first place.

From the business’s perspective, enhancing the operational conditions for your agent trickles down in terms of benefit to your customers. The emotional wellbeing of your customer support agents is equally important as the satisfaction of your clients. Unless they are mentally resilient and technologically equipped to handle the challenges, you can’t benefit the bottom line.

Around 55% of the customer support agents consider a supportive professional environment to be crucial for their success. Now, with a significant number of customer support professionals operating remotely, businesses need to elevate the transition so that they can deliver their optimal best to their customers. This involves reduced workload or working hours, along with complementing their efforts with the right kind of technologies. With this approach, you can keep your customer support agents motivated. 

An organized approach to strategize how your customer support agents would work would help you address their woes. Make sure to have a two-way communication channel with your agents, so that they can report their problems to you.

Next, it’s imperative to keep communication channels open with your customers. Agents riddled with mental stress and workload can possibly vent their frustration on customers. This wouldn’t be something you would want.

Improving the agent workspace for making customer support more efficient

Business owners must prioritize the comfort and ease of operation of their customer support agents. This ensures that they would be the right physical and mental conditions to assist your clients.

Here are the top three aspects that you can do to assist your agents.

• Embrace sophisticated technology that would organize the work of customer support agents and help them manage their responsibilities.
• Be more responsive to identify the evolving needs of your customers. Deploying smart analytics, you can detect new queries, and prepare your agents to handle pressure.
• Launch an omnichannel approach to communicate with your clients, so that they can contact your agents through different mediums. Chat, email support, and instant messaging are some of the relatively new means to connect to your customers.

Come up with an employee-centric stance to benefit your customers

Before we wind up, let’s have a look at some employee-centric approaches that would eventually benefit your customers.

• Have team meetings and open-door policies in place, so that agents can convey their challenges to you. This way, you can come up with innovative remedies to the issues they have been facing.
• Come up with a mechanism where your agents can open up regarding their mental health to you.
• Connect within your customer support teams and even beyond these groups. Also, organize monthly group events to foster better connections within your organization.

The ultimate strategy to assure customer satisfaction is to come up with an employee-centric approach. The happier employees and teams you nurture, the better the benefits your customers would enjoy.