It’s difficult today to find a company that doesn’t recognize the value in soliciting customer feedback. Yet, for contact centers, the benefits of customer feedback can be seen not only at the company level but also at the agent level. Scrutinizing customer feedback for each individual center representative can improve performance and drive greater efficiency.
Customer Feedback & Agent Performance
“Are you talking about me?” People tend to pay more attention when the answer to that question is “yes.” Providing feedback or setting goals based on general trends gleaned from organizational level responses won’t have the same impact. Instead, discuss specific insights drawn from customer survey responses specific to that particular agent. This makes it personal.
Sharing customer feedback helps give agents a real sense of the impact they have on customers and their brand experiences. Plus, sharing concrete comments and ratings from customers provides both qualitative and quantitative measures that the agent can use to develop personal goals. Providing agents with access to the feedback also creates transparency making it clear that leadership benchmarks and objectives are not set arbitrarily.
Additionally, real-time feedback from a customer can be a powerful, motivational tool. Satisfied customers’ comments and ratings can boost employee morale and engagement (key to countering the attrition problem). Positive feedback can foster more brand loyalty as well, along with pride in the business and the job each individual agent is doing for the company.
Negative specific feedback can be motivational too. The advantage in this scenario is that the manager, mentor, or team leader is only reporting the customer opinion. This distances the supervisor who is suggesting improvements from the poor assessments. Instead, he or she is able to focus on being constructive and working with the agent to develop a customized, personal action plan to make sure customers don’t feel this way about the agent again in the future.
Customer Feedback & Center Efficiency
Agent-level customer feedback is gathered via a post-contact survey when the experience with the contact center is still fresh in the caller’s mind. This immediacy provides much more reliable feedback than a tool that follows up with customers by mail a week later or by e-mail (which can net immediate responses but may also get lost in the respondent’s inbox).
Making the effort to identify common threads and trends at the agent level can help managers provide more focused one-on-one coaching or team leaders to offer more individualized mentoring. At the same time, having mentors or managers looking at the agent-level feedback can help free up quality assurance teams. Rather than having to monitor calls, they can instead use analysis of feedback to tailor development programs and tweak on-boarding practices.
Analyzing agent level customer feedback can help your center to identify top performers. Using this information to identify commonalities among these individuals, you can determine:- What technology everyone needs access to,
- Information gaps among under-performers,
- Traits that you might look for in future hires.
You might even use agent feedback — star ratings for instance — in a gamification effort to engage and reward agents. They might compete against others in their team or compete office-wide to top the customer feedback leaderboard.
Finally, soliciting customer feedback at the agent level can also convey to your customers that you value their opinions. You are communicating the importance your organization places on positive customer experiences, while simultaneously encouraging a strong relationship between your business and its customers by asking them what they think.
With a Contact Center Solution from Evolve IP, your business can empower its agents and provide quality, customer feedback for agents.
