How to help agents give the best digital customer experience.
Digital customer service is in demand by consumers who seek convenience and interaction methods similar to those they use in their everyday lives. Businesses are answering these demands by offering digital support channels like chat, text (SMS), and social media. This has changed the face of customer service by putting consumers more in control of how they communicate with organizations.
Just because it's called "digital," however, doesn't mean there isn't human interaction involved. In fact, agent-assisted channels provide some of the best digital customer experience. Channels like chat and email have high satisfaction scores and are among the most preferred. They offer the convenience of digital along with the reassurance of professional assistance.
Because they play such an important role in ensuring consumers have the best digital customer experience possible, contact center agents need to be positioned for success.
This typically means the following:
Comprehensive and effective training.
The onboarding of new agents usually includes a lot of training on software and company policies, and rightfully so. But agents also need training on softer skills, like how to de-escalate tense situations and how to be first-class problem solvers. Additionally, because digital support conversations are mostly written, agents need to be trained on how, for example, to communicate with short phrases without sounding rude; or how to best represent the brand on social media. Organizations who don't skimp on initial and ongoing agent training are well on their way to providing the best digital customer experience they can.
Culture of excellence
Agent experience (AX) is receiving a lot of focus from companies that realize the important role agents play in delivering the best digital customer experience. Much of AX comes down to culture. A business culture that treats agents like professionals and holds them to high standards should foster high quality results. To encourage agents to take more ownership of their performance, businesses can provide them with tools like agent dashboards so they can see how they and their teams are performing against KPIs.
Top-notch tools
By "tools," we mostly mean software. Digital agents are frequently multi-skilled, meaning they are trained to support multiple channels during the same shift, or even at the same time. A possible scenario is an agent handles a chat session, and next a text message, and next an email – or they could handle all three simultaneously. To prevent agents' heads from spinning, they should be armed with software that includes a unified desktop and inbox. Having everything in one place will help agents provide the best digital customer experience.
Agent performance is just as important as the design of customer-facing software when providing digital customer service. Training agents and providing the right tools and culture will help ensure they can deliver the best digital customer experience possible.
NICE CXone provides the tools that make digital customer service agents successful.
MAX (My Agent eXperience) is a revolutionary new cloud contact center agent interface, now available to NICE CXone customers. Based on exhaustive research with agents and supervisors in live contact center environments, MAX was designed to be a simpler, more efficient, and more engaging way for agents to positively interact with customers.
Your customers are trying to reach you for service on digital channels – even if you’re not there yet. How many SMS text messages go to your call center phone number with no response? Who’s trying to find you on Facebook, Twitter, or WhatsApp and not finding you? Now with CXone it is easy to provide digital-first omnichannel service in all the channels your customers expect.
Personalized digital interactions: deliver native experiences in each of 30+ messaging channels, such as rich media, emojis, and other collaboration tools.
Simple to Activate: pre-integrated channels make it easy to offer to customers and agents.
Easy to Say “Yes”: simple packaging removes barriers to offering all channels to customers and agents.
Empowered agents
CXone empowers all your agents to deliver a true digital-first omnichannel customer experience by simultaneously combining all customer interactions in one intelligent inbox across multiple digital channels and voice for agents to select ("pull"), while dynamically prioritizing the most time-sensitive or real-time interactions according to service levels ("push"). All delivered in a single application – complete with full customer context, journey history, and sentiment.
Single Interface: one inbox for all digital messaging and real-time (voice/chat) channels – retaining native experience of each messaging platform.
Agents in Control: ‘pulling’ work in natural flow, while dynamic prioritization maintains SLAs – and prevents ‘cherry picking’.
Customer Card: full customer context, journey and conversation history, plus sentiment.
Holistic management
With CXone, omnichannel interactions are managed holistically, from agents to supervisors and beyond. Integrated workforce optimization, analytics, automation and artificial intelligence across digital and voice interactions ensure complete management across contact center operations.
Self-Service: native AI-powered chatbot and 20+ DEVone AI bots with seamless elevation to agents.
