How To Reduce Turnover In CX

Labor Shortage Hitting Tech

Kristina: The customer service labor shortage is a big deal. What are some strategies for reducing agent turnover?

Puneet Mehta, Founder & CEO, Netomi: This is indeed a major problem, and taking steps to ensure that customer service agents remain productive and engaged is important. Companies are prioritizing the agent experience as a way to reduce turnover. First, technology like AI-powered virtual assistants are taking care of the mundane, repetitive work that makes agents feel like robots themselves. This lets them focus on more complex and higher-level tasks that require more creativity and critical thinking. Due to the large amount of time saved fielding repeatable queries, this results in enhanced agent productivity. 

Adopting tools like AI-powered chatbots also afford agents the opportunity to hone their tech skills and uncover areas for career growth. Many companies are finding their human agents are the best ones to oversee the optimization of these platforms. Empowering them to take on this responsibility often leads to upward mobility and new career advancement. 

Kristina: Agent welfare has become a big issue for CS teams. How can companies protect their agents from aggressive and rude customer interactions?

Puneet: Customer service agents are on the front line. Whether a package is delayed due to supply chain issues or a flight is canceled due to weather, it’s often the agents that have to take the wrath. There are steps that companies can take, though, to make the agent experience a positive one. 

How To Improve AI for CX

First, it is important to look to the source of customers’ frustrations – why are some behaving this way? While some, like weather delays and supply chain issues, are outside of a company’s control, others, like long hold times, are not. One of the single biggest complaints, which leads to irritability, is being put on hold to talk to an agent. Resolution time could be decreased if virtual agents are automatically resolving repeatable queries, and only routing more complex tickets to agents. AI can also be used to triage tickets prior to handing them off to an agent, which may include gathering background information from customers and back-end systems, to arm agents with the personalized context of the customer. 

Second, [agent welfare can be improved] with intelligent routing; getting the right customer to the right agent. These systems can also route tickets based on sentiment to ensure that irate customers aren’t connected to agents who have just experienced a difficult call, in an effort to spare them from back-to-back difficult customers.