4 Sure-Fire Ways to Catapult Agent Engagement with Cognitive Technology

Did you know that 74% of customer support agents are susceptible to occupational burnout without adequate support or resources?

Why you may ask? Well, a usual day in the life of a service agent is quite challenging as they juggle a colossal amount of tasks — troubleshooting complex tickets, handling unhappy customers, maintaining knowledge bases, answering repetitive customer inquiries, and so much more.

A subpar tech stack only increases their burden, thus impeding the agent experience and engagement. That’s alarming because your agent experience is just as important as customer experience, and ameliorating the former proliferates the latter.

The question arises — how do you improve your agents’ experience and engagement? This blog post elucidates that. Let’s get started!

First Things First, Why is Agent Engagement Critical?

Every organization wants its agents to give their best and go the extra mile to improve their KPIs. However, they seldom think about agent effort and happiness.

Engaged service reps mean happier customers and a reduction in customer attrition. In fact, the latest research by Bain & Company suggests that increasing customer retention rates by 5% boosts profits by more than 25%.

But on the flip side, when agents are unhappy or disengaged, the organization faces serious implications. For instance, increased employee turnover leads to a reduction in CSAT that further surges the overall operating costs.

An EBN Study supports the statement by suggesting that it costs employers as much as 33% of a worker’s annual salary to find their replacement.

Hence, it’s good business sense to ensure employees feel valued and appreciated day in and day out. If you’re also looking to cultivate a positive and engaging work culture where your agents can thrive, then arm them with tools or applications available on AppExchange that take away a huge chunk of their workload and make their life easier.

4 Ways to Enhance Your Agent Engagement Using Cognitive Technology

In the digital era, enterprises are leveraging cognitive technology to better engage their service reps. Here’s how you can do it too:

1. Empower Agents with Real-time Insights

How long your service rep takes to find relevant information influences the TTR and agent productivity. Picture this: a user contacts your service center only to be asked to wait or be suggested a solution they have already tried. It can be frustrating at times.

That is where AppExchange applications save the day. They provide agents with real-time insights into case resolutions. This allows your service engineers to quickly resolve issues and give customers exactly what they need. It also increases their speed and motivates them to do better.

2. Arm Agents with Proactive Recommendations

Imagine having a solution pop right up when the agent starts working on a ticket. Quite convenient, right? Well, it is possible with the help of cognitive technology. It fuels an insights engine that analyzes customer data across multiple touchpoints and helps the support aficionado personalize their experience with relevant content.

Subsequently, when a customer lands on the self-service portal, they can find instant answers to their queries, thereby deflecting cases, augmenting CSAT, and reducing churn. Additionally, effective self-service portals capacitate agents to offload mundane or rote tasks to automated systems and act as a cue for them to focus their energy on high-priority cases.

3. Detect User Intent and Sentiment for Intelligent Prioritization

Good companies focus on understanding the customers, but great companies focus on customers’ sentiment and intent. Picture this: a customer tries to find a solution to a technical issue after exploring various self‑service channels. Unable to find the information, they decide to reach out to the customer service, only to find themselves in a long queue.

Won’t it be phenomenal if the algorithms can foretell whether the customer is in a good or bad mood by detecting the sentiment and intent? This way, they can be directly routed to a dedicated agent on priority.

That is possible with the help of AppExchange apps like SearchUnify’s Escalation Predictor. They can give your agents actionable insights into the customer’s emotional state in real-time. How you may ask?

By harnessing the power of ML algorithms, the app analyzes the users’ historical data, purchase patterns, intent from the searched data, and much more. The granular reports show the service reps the entire customer journey map with all the touchpoints and sentiments, allowing them to get the complete picture, prioritize the case, and act accordingly. Result: the customer is delighted that, in turn, improves FCR and CSAT.

4. Push Swarm Resolutions to Your Knowledge Base

Most customers find themselves in a waiting room limbo when ticket ping-ponging takes place. The reason? Agents are unable to find the right information at the right time due to poor knowledge management (KM).

Fret not; AppExchange applications like KCS Enabler come to the rescue. They eliminate the recurring blockades of knowledge creation by automatically populating new articles as a by-product of agents’ resolutions for undocumented issues.

In addition to that, KCS sets in motion a continuous loop process that accelerates knowledge creation, populates new knowledge base articles with recommended templates, and monitors and quantifies KCS performance. This saves agents’ time and allows them to focus on the case resolutions.

Want to Experience AppExchange Next-Gen Applications Live in Action?

Check out SearchUnify and other AI-powered solutions on AppExchange that will act as your end-to-end knowledge management solution and catapult agent engagement and proactive support in a jiffy.