Empower Agents to Work Effectively From Anywhere With Digital Voice

In today’s hybrid work environment, service team members are rarely all located under one roof. This makes it critical to have the right customer service engagement tools in place to collaborate no matter where teammates are located. Managers must maintain a clear view of everyone’s availability and skillset to ensure that neither the agent nor customer experience suffers. 

Luckily for service leaders, telephony now enables phone calls to come to service agents through the cloud so they can answer on their laptops. At the same time, cloud-based digital telephony gives managers the ability to track, measure, and influence all aspects of every agent’s calls, from pickup to wrap up. This makes call center management much easier. 

When the phone channel is integrated with CRM and treated the same as other digital channels, service leaders gain a detailed view of what’s happening across their virtual call centers. They’re able to use automation and artificial intelligence (AI) to instantly identify service issues and trends impacting agent performance. 

With these data-driven insights into agent performance, each new call is an opportunity for service leaders to build smarter, more responsive service teams. Call center coaching becomes more specific and personalized, and therefore more powerful. Below are three specific ways service leaders can use digital voice to empower their agents no matter where their workplace is today.

Gain actionable, real-time call insights 

Digital voice allows supervisors to monitor calls, capture insights, and assist agents in real time, at a distance. Through a supervisor dashboard, service leaders can see at-a-glance:

• How many agents are available 
• Which agent is currently on a call
• Who an agent is talking to
• Length of a call
• Simple call sentiment 

If the customer sentiment dips below a specified level, a prompt to intervene comes across the supervisor’s screen. Real-time call transcripts are generated as the agent’s conversation unfolds, providing an opportunity for immediate supervisor feedback and support. 

Review and improve agent performance with post-call data

Previous call technology could only track a limited amount of information, such as who the call was routed to, the interactive voice response (IVR) path the call came through, and how long the case lasted. Now, with every call transcribed in real-time and automatically analyzed by artificial intelligence (AI), service leaders can easily review agent performance and gain powerful insights to provide tailored feedback and ongoing coaching. 

From a single dashboard, supervisors can: 

• Search a call’s digital transcript for specific keywords or common issues.
• Tag specific sections of a call with notes for the next reviewer.
• Flag areas and identify trends across calls with a particular issue or agent.
• Get objective tracking of competitor or product mentions during calls. 
• Interpret conversations based upon predetermined criteria using AI.
• Accurately apply sentiment scores and track keywords (and synonyms) over time and at scale. 

Provide agent career development through in-the-moment feedback 

Gallup research shows that today’s employees want development, purpose, and in-the-moment feedback. In other words, they’re actively looking for objective coaching to improve their skills and advance their careers. Providing these things to agents ultimately leads to higher customer service engagement levels. 

Digital voice makes it possible for service leaders to collaborate with agents across the team and provide tailored career development opportunities. Supervisors can watch multiple calls and conversations simultaneously. They can add notes to a call as it progresses. This creates a reference point for future individual coaching sessions or an example for team-wide training. If a call is flagged by the AI for review, supervisors can provide real-time feedback through their internal messaging system. 

Armed with a clear view into agent capacity and workflow, managers can focus on individual and team engagement. They can leverage agents’ unique talents and strengths, and use data to set clear expectations and performance goals. This empowers every leader to become a better, more empathetic coach and enable agents on their unique career development paths.

Make agent success easy with the right technology

“Moving to cloud telephony has really enabled us to continue to pave our path to an omni-channel experience, helping us consolidate all the channels into a single platform,” says Jesser Cruz, senior program manager at Remitly. “But most importantly, it has enabled us to provide contextual data to the associates regardless of the channel. This ensures that they get everything they need to know in order to resolve the customer’s problem effectively.”

Given the shift to the hybrid workforce, call centers must continue to evolve how they interact with their customers and each other. When voice becomes a data-rich digital channel, service leaders gain a clear view of their customers and agents. They equip their teams to deliver exceptional customer service from anywhere.

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