Customer Experience, Work

What is CX in 2019?

Here’s a post I contributed to with a lot of comments from people across the web on what CX is in 2019 – both what it looks like today, and where it’s going in the future.

Here’s my section, covering where I’m seeing CX going over the course of the year. A big part of this is that I’m pretty excited about automation opportunities for contact centers, and I’m proud to be working for a company that’s helping other companies make their first tentative steps into automation.

Maybe I’ll write about why I’m so excited about automation in another post. But let me say now – I think it’s a real win-win as it can not just help companies make resource savings but also help to improve the agent experience by reducing repetitive, unskilled work.

Anyway, here’s my comment! Do read through the full article linked to at the end of this post.

“I’m definitely seeing CX leaders looking to adapt faster to changing customer preferences and getting their operations ready to adopt automation and bot technologies. From building stronger knowledge bases to aid human and bot knowledge to providing great service over new channels, the CX industry is becoming ever more strategic and aligned to customer needs.


I’m sure in 2019 we’re going to see a lot of messy implementations of new technology and processes, but I hope that amidst the rubble of CX disasters we’ll see organizations getting really innovative and providing service in ways that just weren’t possible a year ago.


I’m especially excited to see more and more organizations adopting chatbots that provide quick, quality answers in appropriate places in the customer journey and which show that bots, when properly designed and trained, can be a real asset to customer service operations.”

Originally published here.

Customer Experience, Emotional Intelligence, Learning & Training, Work

To Script or Not to Script? Positive Live Chat Support Scripting

The word ‘script’ can strike fear into the hearts of agents and managers alike. Nobody wants chat agents to sound robotic or to take away their freedom to express their personality and demonstrate their expertise.

Having said that, your agents are the voice of your organization. Because of this, it’s important that your agents can speak appropriately to your customers, providing an experience that’s cohesive and consistent no matter who in your company your customer is speaking to – and effective call center and live chat scripts can help you to do that.

In this post, I’ll cover:

  • Why Script?
  • Scripting Sins – Are You Guilty?
  • How to Implement Really Effective Scripts

Why Script?

If scripts are so easily misused, why have them in the first place?

Simple. Scripts can save time, act as a knowledge bank, and reinforce your brand.

Let’s explore this a bit more.

Saving time is important to everyone involved in customer service, and certainly important in live chat too. Customers don’t want to be tied up on chats for any longer than they need to, and you’ll certainly be concerned with ensuring handle times are kept low, freeing up agents to take more chats.

Even if you’re a hardcore anti-scripter, consider the impact of agents manually typing out the same greeting and closing message on every chat they take. Even if this takes only 30 seconds per chat, and even if you only take twenty chats a day, this adds up to ten minutes of wasted agent time per day. Multiply over the course of a year, and you’re looking at around 60 hours of paid agent time lost to ineffective processes, when a canned message could have done the job for a fraction of the time.

Scripts can also act as a knowledge bank. A well-organized live chat script library can contain ready-made solutions to common customer problems, reducing the need for agents to be reliant on their own memories or external documents to find the answers they need.

Reinforcing your brand is vital to appeal to your target market. Scripts can help to set the appropriate tone of voice for your company, ensuring that all of your agents are speaking to customers in a positive, helpful and appropriate way.

Scripting Sins – Are You Guilty?

Given the benefits of scripts, many businesses jump to use these without considering how to implement them in a way that doesn’t compromise the customer experience. There are lots of ways scripts can be misused – make sure you’re not guilty of these sins.

Deadly Sin #1 – Using Canned Responses Which Don’t Answer the Question

There’s nothing more frustrating than not being listened to. Agents skimming chats and firing off canned responses which don’t fully answer customer questions can derail chats and damage relationships. Take this as an example:

Kyle: Can you tell me how much the ultimate plan will cost and whether I can keep my old phone?

Tom: Our Ultimate Plan is $39.99 per month and includes unlimited calling to numbers in the US and Canada. It also contains free texts and 4GB of data. Data above this limit is charged at $5.00 per 100MB.

Kyle: What about my old phone?? I don’t need to know about data over my limit. Are you a robot?

How to Fix This: Train your agents to fully respond to all customer questions in a seamless way, blending canned messages with free-form input to craft responses which hit the mark first time.

Deadly Sin #2 – Agent Style Doesn’t Match Style of Canned Messages

Your customers expect a service which is personalized and makes them feel they’re being given time and consideration by a real person. If your agent’s writing style doesn’t match the style of your canned messages, it’ll be obvious that canned messages are being used.

This inconsistency of communication can look really unprofessional, as well as making customers uncomfortable about the ever-changing tone of the chat.

Cara: Hi, the taxi I called hasn’t showed up, why is this?

Liam: Please accept our apologies that the taxi you called has not arrived. I will look into the details right now for you.

Liam: what time did you call the taxi?

How to Fix This: Make sure your agents have access to a style guide which sets the tone for written communication on chats and target this communication style through ongoing quality assurance.

Deadly Sin #3 – Canned Messages Are Just Plain Terrible

Remember the “Three C’s” when creating scripts – they should be ClearCorrect and Concise. They should sound just as if they’re transcribed from a person who knows your product, audience, and culture really well.

Although this point sounds obvious, it can take some skill. Let’s explore what canned messages can look like without this consideration.

Jim: I want to close my account.

Rachel: I am sorry to hear you would like to close your account.

Rachel: I will certainly help you today in this regard.

Rachel: I would like to inform you that we are limited in the information to give over chat, cancellation involves your verbal agreement so please contact on the telephone 936 835 7112 (8am – 11pm PST Monday – Friday or 9am – 9pm PST Saturday/Sunday) and one of my associates will put in effort to do the needful today.

There’s a few things wrong with these scripts. Probably one of the most glaring is that they are not written in proper English phrasing and style, with phrases like “Do the needful” creating barriers between the agent and the customer. Another issue is that it takes a long time to get to the point, with canned messages almost contradicting themselves by offering to help then stating that help can’t be given.

How to Fix This: Review your customer service scripts to ensure they’re correct in language, tone and phrasing. Identify areas where scripted canned messages can create confusion and ensure clear guidance is given to agents on how to handle this. Train agents to get to the point quickly, using canned messages to help save time, not add to it.

How to Implement Really Effective Scripts

Start by asking your agents what type of scripts could help them in their work. Your staff on the front line will know all too well the situations where they wish they had a canned message to save time and provide guidance, and a quick focus group will allow you to pinpoint these scenarios and start drafting some scripts.

Next, plan how to organize your scripts. Scripts which aren’t simple for your agents to access and use are just as bad as no scripts at all. Our guide has some suggestions for categories you may wish to use.

Finally, look at some free call center and live chat scripts and think how they could be adapted to your business. The best scripts aren’t cookie-cutter responses which will be perfect for every business – they may need some tweaking to suit the tone and style your organization speaks in. However, many customer service best practices are applicable across organizations, so some scripts might just be perfect to help make your chat service even more friendly and efficient.

Culture, Emotional Intelligence, Team Building, Work

Constructive, Positive Feedback Tips for Your Contact Center Agents

As a contact center leader, you will know the importance of feedback to help your agents continuously learn and improve their work. Truly effective contact centers recognize that agent development should continue to occur even long after initial call center training, and that constructive feedback and coaching should be a part of the entire employee lifecycle.

Many management development programs teach the basics of giving great feedback, but choosing the right method of doing so can often be difficult – and actually getting results from that feedback can be even harder, which is why we recommend getting to know more about the EHS Insight.

Here are some straightforward feedback tips you can start using right now to shake up the way that you give constructive feedback, engage with the development needs of your reports and ensure that you’re consistently acting as a driver for exceptional quality within your center.

Show, Don’t Tell

Asking your agents to reflect on their own interactions is often a very effective way to get the message through. Many agents take pride in their work and can be often more critical about their own work than you would be, so take advantage of this.

This method works especially well for call center QA reviews, where you can pre-prepare some examples of conversations you want to give feedback on, and focus on the areas where you think some learning could occur.

In your QA review meetings, ask your agent to look at or listen to the interaction, thinking about what went well or not so well in four areas:

  • Put yourself in the customer’s shoes. Was language used positive? Was tone appropriate? Were their thoughts and feelings acknowledged and adapted to?
  • Was the interaction professional in terms of established conventions in your center – such as the greeting, the closing statements, hold or escalation processes, any survey offering, or any other mandatory requirements?
  • Was the right information given? Was it enough for the customer? Could any more detail or information have been useful?
  • What else could you have done? Were there any alternatives which could be offered? Were there any opportunities to go above and beyond?

Give your agent time to make some notes or collect their thoughts and ask them what they thought about each area. Often the agent will be able to see areas to develop if you are able to lead them in the right direction to think about these areas in detail. Make sure you are using high-quality questions throughout, such as “Tell me what you thought about…”, “How did you feel about…” to encourage your agent to open up as much as possible.

This method is great for… encouraging agents who are quiet and don’t contribute much in feedback sessions to open up and engage critically with their work.

Challenge Ingrained Behavior

Many of us hope that when we’re giving constructive feedback, the person who it has been given to will take it on board and act upon it. However, some agents will agree with feedback given while they are in the room with you, but carry on using the same old behaviors anyway.

There can be several reasons for this. Either, agents just don’t agree with the feedback given, or see why it’s important. They might feel threatened, worried or unclear about how they can actually make a change. And we all know ourselves that unless we really believe in and are committed to a goal, we are unlikely to actually make changes – consider the amount of New Year’s resolutions made each year that don’t last.

It’s important to realize that every behavior has a positive intent – that is, for everything a person says and does, there will be a positive factor behind it for them, even if that intent is simple self-preservation.

In order to get your agents bought in to making the changes you need, you need to drill down to what intent is driving the way a person acts at the moment, emphasise the negative consequences of this, and propose a more appealing option. (If you can’t think of any ways in which the option you’re proposing is more appealing, perhaps you might want to think about whether it is such a good option after all.)

Questions you can consider asking to get to the bottom of this are:

  • What is it about [this behavior] that makes you keep doing it?
  • What are the advantages of carrying on doing it?
  • What are the disadvantages?
  • What would your work look like if you carried on doing this?
  • What would your work look like if you stopped doing this?
  • What advice would you give to someone else in your exact position?

Asking questions like this will help you to understand the roots of a behavior. It also gives your agent a chance to critically examine why they act the way they act, open up conversation about the real issues underlying a problem, and allow you both to collaborate on a plan of action that gets both of you what you need.

This method is great for… changing stubborn behavioral issues that just don’t seem to shift.

Harness Creative Thinking to Create Solutions to Problems

“How you think about a problem is more important than the problem itself so always think positively”– Norman Vincent Peale

Often, even where an agent agrees that a change is needed, they might not know exactly how to make that change. You can facilitate a brainstorming exercise here to explore the different possibilities an agent has to make a successful change, or achieve a goal.

Once you and your agent have worked to figure out an outcome they would like to achieve, ask them to draw on a piece of paper, in bubbles, the following headings:

  1. Tasks and things to do
  2. Resources needed
  3. Obstacles
  4. Solutions to overcoming obstacles
  5. Other people who could help
  6. Reasons to involve other people

Ask them to spend a solid five minutes brainstorming potential solutions, using each of these areas as a prompt. The key here is to ask them not to analyse or criticize anything they write – as soon as they think of any idea, get it straight out on paper. It doesn’t matter how outlandish or silly an idea is, they should write it down. Sometimes the best ideas come from pure creativity, and creativity isn’t critical.

By looking at a problem is a new way, you can lead your agents to discover solutions and resources they didn’t previously consider were available to them. Harnessing creative thinking can be a great way to drive development, and by looking at an issue in a fresh way, help others to realise the wealth of potential help they have all around them.

This method is great for… agents who reply “I don’t know” when you ask them how they could achieve a goal.

Build a Development Culture

Giving feedback isn’t easy, but tracking the progress of your reports in acting on feedback can be even harder. SMART goal setting is a common way to set a goal and the conditions through which it can be realised, but many managers don’t follow through with tracking the progress of even a SMART goal.

Some of this can be down to setting clear expectations and opportunities to discuss as the goal is worked towards. Make it clear when goal setting that you’ll be interested in and connected to your agent’s progress, and don’t be afraid to drop into everyday conversation a quick enquiry into how your agent is working towards achieving their goal.

A quick check-in, using a phrase like “How are you getting on with [your goal]?” can go a long way towards giving your agent an opportunity to ask for any further help or support, while showing that continuous improvement is something that’s part of your everyday language.

This method is great for… building a long-term, truly effective feedback culture for your entire contact center.

Do you have any tips for ways to give great feedback, and helping agents to make changes which really stick? Let me know in the comments below.

Customer Experience, Learning & Training, Technology, Work

How to nail complex query resolution with internal knowledge bases

It’s 2019, and our contact centers are changing fast. The proliferation of new channels over recent years means that now, some 67% of customers prefer using self-service options instead of speaking with an agent.

If you started your career as an agent and remember trying hard to treat every call like it was your first despite having already heard that query ten times that day, this stat will likely have you breathing a sigh of relief. Apart from the decrease in repetition being a good thing, being there for customers on the channels that they choose is a great CX strategy. But a downside of this is that the queries which end up in our contact centers will normally be more complex.

How can we help agents better answer these complex queries? Enter the humble internal knowledge base (KB). A well-designed KB can act as a tool to help employees work better and smarter, drive continuous improvement, improve quality, and increase collaboration. Here’s how.

The right tool for the job

Back when customer queries were solved with single-sentence answers, many of us resorted to memorization, cheat sheets and post-it notes on our computer monitors to remember key pieces of information to help us in our jobs.

But this type of learning doesn’t often work well when we’re aiming to understand and resolve complex query types. The interplay of emotionally-charged interactions and multitudes of gray-area options to choose from can make decision-making a complex exercise, and it’s not always clear what the “right” thing to do is.

In these instances, providing employees with resources they can use in-the-moment to better weigh up each case and strengthen their decision-making is a smart bet. A KB can act as this type of resource, working to lessen the mental information load that employees need to bear and providing this in-the-moment support even for obscure query types.

Having ready resources isn’t just good for quick customer resolutions, but having access to the right tools for the job is central to employee engagement, which impacts productivity, satisfaction, and ultimately, churn.

You might think that a KB is good for only those black-and-white Q&As where there is a set Q and an unambiguous A, but it is possible to set up a KB to support employees in resolving subjective cases through harnessing technological options within KB platforms themselves.

Let tech do the heavy lifting

I didn’t have a KB platform at all when I built my very first internal KB. I took the HTML skills I had learned from building cringe-worthy teenage poetry websites (which, thankfully, died with Geocities), spun up a rudimentary website, got it hosted on our Intranet, embedded a Google search, and launched it with myself as the editor.

About ten years ago that seemed like a reasonable plan, given that our center had repetitive query types and processes which didn’t change much over time. Thankfully, KB platforms have developed to help us run much more robust KBs in more complex environments.

Many KBs are now much easier to maintain, without needing to duplicate information from other sources- for example, by hosting separate customer and agent-facing KBs on the same platform and optionally, updating from each other. They often come with full reporting suites for better visibility into the effectiveness of your KB. It’s even possible to embed AI into your KB so even if a user were to type in a search term that was ambiguous or unclear, the AI could pick up on the intent behind it and deliver the right article regardless.

Importantly, your KB can have multiple editors and methods for adding to it. Your agents can not only draw upon the information in a KB but also add to and comment upon it, whether through inbuilt functionality or integrations with platforms such as Slack . That’s important for complex query resolution for one main reason:

The best customer outcomes are often a collaborative effort

There’s a reason the apprenticeship model of learning has worked beautifully since the dawn of time – we learn well from others in an on-the-job setting, where we can experience and discuss work in context.

But given the nature of much contact center work, it can be difficult to implement collaborative learning processes, which by nature are social. Strictly scheduled environments often don’t allow much employee interaction to occur beyond formalized meetings, scheduled breaks or snatched chats at the water cooler.

That’s a shame, because we can often make the most sense of complex situations at work when we share them with others who have been through similar experiences and can offer different perspectives and ideas. Encouraging employees to discuss complex cases is an exercise ripe for learning, as failures and successes can be shared and learned from without each employee needing to follow the same bumpy path.

The beauty of encouraging collaboration on complex queries through a KB is that employees can interact with it in the course of their everyday work. This allows them to collaborate asynchronously, without a heavy load on agent schedules. Collaboration shouldn’t be limited only to your agent team – other teams can also be set up to view and collaborate upon cross-functional knowledge items.

This kind of process doesn’t need to start off on a formal KB platform, either. On the CX Accelerator community recently, Lauren Volpe shared a great example of collaborative learning via a CX Tracker, where team members share details of tricky cases so others can benefit.

Getting to this point may require some cultural changes to occur too. It’s important to encourage your team to view continuous improvement as a team exercise, which treasures its experts and grows its newbies, and which recognizes that it’s through sharing information (not hoarding it) that we can get our best work done.

Future-proof your contact centre’s knowledge

Let’s go back to those expert staff members for a moment. If your contact center contains a few wise sages who intuitively know the right answer to most queries, you’ll know how valuable they are, and how often they can get called upon to share their knowledge.

But you’ll also know how dangerous this can be. Reliance on a few staff as oracles of knowledge is a dangerous tactic, plunging your team into difficulties if they leave. Not to mention that in a carefully scheduled environment, allowing these seasoned staff members time to walk the floor and be available for answering questions isn’t always ideal, let alone scalable.

Great KBs can become living resources that wean reliance off those wise sages by letting knowledge loose outside of people’s heads. Plus, if you can set up your KB to be added to by everyone as they learn and discuss new queries, the information within them can become greater than anything an individual alone could convey.

KBs are the new training

In the past, most educational models were designed around the fact that information wasn’t easily accessible. To learn something new you needed to go on a training course, consult an expert, or check out a book from the library.

Times have now changed. Mobile devices and internet access mean that we and our employees don’t need to go through an extensive process of information synthesis or training to learn a new thing. Most people are pretty capable of figuring things out for themselves. We just look up information, and get things done.

Despite this, many organizations still rely on formalized training interventions to attempt to help employees to learn. Usually this consists of trainers resorting to information-stuffing strategies – for example taking employees away from their desks, attempting to fill them with as much pure information as possible, and adding in some sort of game or test to help make sure that information isn’t so easily forgotten. We’re now starting to understand how ineffective these types of methods are.

Times are changing and the way we think about contact center learning needs to change too. We need to get better at providing employees with the technology and resources they need to learn from each other and just do their jobs, no information-stuffing required.

Especially given the resource-stretched, turnover-ridden nature of the environments we operate in, many centers could achieve this by better harnessing tools like KBs – providing the conditions to learn better, smarter and quicker, even in increasingly complex environments.

Originally published here.

Customer Experience, Technology, Work

[Webinar] The Future of Live Chat in 2019

This webinar was a blast.

Jeff and I are good buddies, so it’s always fun presenting with him. However, this webinar was especially significant as it aired just before we launched Comm100’s 2019 Benchmark Report, so we got to share some sneak peeks at the stats before it was even live.

As well as discussing the findings from the latest benchmark report, we chatted about the growing pains experienced by different sizes of call centers, and gave some tips for organisations of all kinds to consider in the year ahead.

All of these insights come straight from what we’ve learned from our own customer base, so it’s useful stuff for anyone looking to align their contact center with best practice and trends in 2019.

Have a listen, and I’d love to hear what you think.

Watch the webinar recording here.

Download Comm100’s 2019 Live Chat Benchmark Report here.

Learning & Training, Recognition, Work

I’m in Forbes! My commitment to Working Out Loud

I always said a life goal was to be published in Forbes, and happily, today my friend Dan Gingiss posted my CX New Years Resolution along with a compilation of resolutions from other CX friends to Forbes. This was a nice thing to see today. I’m still determined to get published by Forbes in my own right one day though! 😛

Here’s the post, thanks Dan!

My CX New Years Resolution, as mentioned in this post, is to do more working out loud – which is simply about giving voice to what you’re doing at work. There is an entire movement, a book, and peer support groups to help, which I must admit I haven’t explored a lot yet as my #1 goal for now is just to build a good writing habit.

Why is working out loud important?

Primarily I want to build better relationships, get more feedback, and become more open to collaboration. But also, I’m concerned about the impact of people hoarding information, and I want to make a stand against that.

As a trainer, I’ve come up against instances where SMEs are afraid to share what they know for fear that they will become less necessary. I get that. Work is relational and political, no matter what type of organisation you work within. And so many of us work in industries or companies with unstable job security, or in cultures that discourage collaboration. Whether that’s through forced rankings, open plan offices, or any other management practices which kill communication and pit us against each other.

If you’re a busy professional, it’s not always easy to share, either. It takes time and thought to communicate knowledge, especially knowledge that’s tacit – that which we have intuitively learned.

But if we care at all about keeping our organisations and professions healthy, useful and growing, I believe we all have a duty to contribute to developing our collective knowledge.

Not only because I have a utopian idea that professional knowledge and education should be accessible to everyone, no matter who you are, and that everyone should get the chance to be whatever kind of professional they wish if they are prepared to put in the work and the effort.

But also because humanity would have achieved next to nothing had we not shared our stories, ideas, thoughts with each other. Communication and sharing are how we achieve growth and change in the world.

My commitment

This year I want to share more, and more frequently. This is as good a place as any to share, and I will be breaking with my previous posting style to try and build a blog that’s a little warmer and more thoughtful than the cross-posted content I usually throw onto here.

I’m hoping to write a lot more about both CX and L&D, but I’m also not limiting myself to that. I’m a little tired of the notion of needing to maintain a professional persona that’s ‘strictly business’ (because I don’t agree with shaming people who don’t comply) so I might post about other things too.

I hope that all of this means that I can bring others closer while providing thoughts and ideas to muse upon. I want critique, conversation and for my mind to be changed. I’m looking forward to getting started.

Customer Experience, Learning & Training, Work

From the field: Customer service skills you need today

This Zendesk Relate article includes a snippet about my career path from customer service to learning & training.

Just like most other things on Relate, it’s a considered and interesting article with a lot of different angles on career pathing in customer service.

Here’s what I contributed, but do click through to check out the entire article, as it’s a great read.

Kaye Chapman entered the world of customer support absolutely unplanned. Fresh out of college, unsure what to do (been there, done that!), Chapman got a job in a call center to pay the bills while she figured out her next move. She never left.

After some time, she could see that there was room for improvement. Quality assurance was patchy, there was no internal knowledge base or help center, and training was subpar at best. Her overworked manager was all too happy for Kaye to step in and provide some help, so she took the bull by the horns and made improving those things her focus.

Chapman built an extensive knowledge base, strengthened quality processes, and provided training for her team, all while holding down the role of senior customer service rep. From there she realized she had a real knack for training and expressed the desire to become a full-time trainer.

The company she worked for at the time agreed to sponsor her to go back to school and she spent her evenings learning how to build effective training programs, work with adult learners, and other skills like coaching, change management, and talent development. She’s since gained plenty of experience in roles at Fortune 500 companies, startups, and nonprofits, even earning a Masters degree based off her professional qualifications, despite not having a Bachelor degree.

All of this led her to her current role as Learning & Development Manager for Comm100. In our chat, she told me, ‘In that very first customer support role, if I had shrugged off all of the things I saw that could have been improved and wrote them off as none of my business, I’d never be where I am today. I definitely see my career growth as fueled by having a real desire to drive improvement and change, even in areas that aren’t within my job description.’

Read the Zendesk article here.

Learning & Training, Technology, Work

Five Tips To Successfully Onboard Live Chat Agents

Live chat communications continue to trend upwards in importance. No surprise here. eMarketer predicts that in just one year from now, 80 percent of the world’s smartphone users will use messaging apps. We’re more connected than ever, and that provides challenges for modern sales and service organizations. Today’s online customers want and expect a fast response time to their customer service query, plus a frictionless way to initiate support.

Forrester reports that 55 percent of adults will abandon online purchases if they can’t find a quick answer to a question, with 77 percent stating that good online customer service is the most important thing a company can do for them. It’s clear that in today’s climate of consumer choice, organizations who provide support at point of sale through live chat stand to gain the most in customer loyalty and reduced cart abandonments.

Connecting with website visitors through live chat also takes less time and human resources than phone support to consumers, raising productivity and profitability. As chat agents are expected by their organizations to be valued support partners for customers and prospects, these individuals play a larger role than ever in securing overall customer satisfaction and brand equity.

For new agents, a structured onboarding program is crucial to allow organizations to ensure that they’re getting the satisfaction outcomes they seek. Not only does effective onboarding introduce employees to processes and procedures within their new role, it also builds confidence, trust and engagement at possibly the most crucial stage of their lifecycle in the organization – a stage that largely sets the tone for the rest of their employment and their interactions with customers.

Here are some tips for managers and leaders looking to build an effective live chat agent onboarding process, or refine their existing one.

1. Train to the chat platform

Chat systems tout their ease of use and turnkey nature. However, any technology tool requires time for operators to get familiar. Optimal use of tech by live chat agents is fluid and tacit, and even with the simplest of tools, it still takes time for agents to get to this level of mastery.

Make training hands-on, incorporate real-life exercises, and use training-ready versions of the platform to allow agents to roleplay and test common scenarios. Give agents time to play around on the platform and engage in practice runs before bringing them live. The last thing your agents need while tangling with customer issues is also battling the tech they use, so don’t assume they’ll just “pick it up”.

2. Establish clearly defined goals and relevant metrics

If your agents aren’t clear on what they’re supposed to achieve, they won’t be able to secure the outcomes you need. While this might sound common-sense, failing to clearly communicate expectations is a symptom of the “curse of knowledge” – where we can assume that agents know the ropes when that’s simply not the case.

The concept of “going above and beyond” is one area that’s often neglected in agent onboarding, as many see it as a basic tenet of customer service, or something that should be implicit in an agent’s personality. But it’s a hugely important area which should be explicitly covered in onboarding to be sure that your agents really are on the same page as you. For service organizations, not practicing this philosophy can spell CSat disaster– and for sales organizations, this equals leaving money on the table.

Don’t leave this to chance. Promote this concept and empower your new live chat agent to do more than just answer a visitor’s stated questions. Challenge them to always consider what other help they could provide, or what else could be useful if they were in the customer’s position.

In terms of lead generation, this “one step further” approach is especially vital. Teach agents early on how best to seek out potential lead opportunities. That means more than just pointing the customer to a white paper. They should also offer to pass them to an inside sales person for more in-depth discussions, or to a video that requires registration, for example. Giving customer service agents the authority to foster meaningful dialogue rather than focusing on how quickly chats are completed can support lead generation objectives as well.

3. Integrate them with the entire chat team

Research into learning has shown that development of knowledge in onboarding is inseparably bound to learner activity in a number of different contexts – the physical (work space), the material (tools and tech) and the social (other employees).

Because of this, social aspects of learning and working should be accounted for within effective onboarding programs. Your goal should be to help your new agent learn from other seasoned agents, and empower them to build relationships within the whole team.

Before going solo, new agents should serve time as an understudy to one of the team’s top performers to glean proven tips and tactics to successfully perform the job. Document best practices to disseminate valuable “lessons from the front line” to all agents. Establishing weekly meetings to discuss events that went well, those that didn’t and trends in the field that can turn into great teaching moments for the entire live chat team.

As a bonus, creating this kind of supportive team environment will improve the productivity and success of all agents, not just those who recently joined the company.

4. Educate agents on when to get help

A live chat agent can solve a majority of the customer service issues that come in, but they can’t act as a mouthpiece for every function within your company. Most likely, they can deal effectively with 80 percent to 90 percent of customer queries, with the extra 10 to 20 percent needing further checking, information or consultation with other teams.

That’s not a bad thing. If you try to force agents to deal with things that require too much improvisation or that the agent does not have authority to do, you will trigger negative customer interactions.

Set procedures for agents to quickly get assistance from a supporting team or team leader when issues are beyond the scope of their power or authority to resolve. Recognize that on paper, this sounds simple, but in practice this can be a lot tougher – even the most seasoned agents encounter situations they haven’t seen before, and deciding where the boundaries are isn’t always easy to define.

Focus on building supports to help your agents in their decision making, for example through a robust agent-facing KB, or through having team leaders and floor walkers readily available. Build a culture of communication which encourages agents to speak up when they’re not sure about something and discourages them from “winging it”.

Finally, make sure that whatever supports you use, they’re easy and quick for agents to access. Few things are more frustrating for a customer than spending 15 minutes on a live chat waiting for an answer because the agent doesn’t have the assistance they need at hand.

5. Utilize Technology To Support Agents

Technology is developing rapidly, and for many contact centers, shifting to new tech-focused service models comes with questions and risks. There’s sometimes a view that technology will end up reducing service quality, and some are even concerned that chatbots and AI will end up taking jobs away from humans.

This narrative is shifting as firms begin to recognize the best applications for this technology – and often, that means aiming to complement and enhance the work of human agents, not to replace them.

When used properly chatbots can provide great advantages to a new agent. The ability for bots to take on common customer queries cuts out questions which can be perceived as boring or repetitive, leaving your agents to focus only on the queries that need their help the most. This allows you to effectively upskill your agent pool as your agents develop expertise in longer and more complex queries. Agents enjoy connecting with customers, not answering repetitive questions.

Augmented intelligence is another exciting area through which agents can be provided with data which helps them to make better decisions. Through deep learning, natural language processing and multivariate analysis, companies are able to analyze more variables and more extensive data sets than is humanly possible to help agents perform better at their jobs. The goal of these systems should focus on arming humans with information they can use to engage the customer more effectively.

At RapportBoost and Comm100, we’ve frequently seen that the very best chat agents aren’t the ones who are naturally gifted at charming the customer. They’re the ones who possess superior emotional intelligence, situational awareness, defer to the algorithm in certain circumstances, plus use their instincts and experience to decide when different situations require different tactics.

The combination of human AND machine once again beats either one alone – and this is certainly an exciting prospect for anyone looking to help agents to do the best job that they can, through onboarding and beyond.

Originally published here.