A day in the life: Agents

Hey everybody, welcome back to another segment of a day in the life of the contact center.

Now, today we're focusing on the employee, and this is near and dear to my heart. This is incredibly important to understand, so when people go to market and they go and they pursue the different contact center buyers, they're constantly focusing on the customer experience - how to transform that customer experience, and really make the customer the center focus of that conversation. And I agree that's a very important part to focus on, but what is equally important is focusing on employees.

Employee satisfaction is very important inside the contact center. In fact, it's one of the industries that has the highest rate of attrition out there, that's a commoditized job. People can pick up from one center. They can go to another center, and so if we can focus internally, we can focus on the employee satisfaction, make their lives easier - hey that's pretty compelling to me, so if you're talking to a business owner, absolutely direct your conversation towards the employee experience.

Now, if we start looking at our slides here, we see these beautiful people getting set up. They're smiling, they're happy, and that's great, but I will tell you that it's not typically normal. This image just makes it seem a little bit more simple than what reality actually is. If we progress here, it's actually probably a little bit more like this. It's a frustrating job. It's daunting. It's a huge, monumental task to do everything the business wants you to do and keep another human being happy on the other end of that phone.

Now as we discussed, contact centers could be many different things. This could be a live chat agent that you see. This could be somebody taking inbound phone calls. This could be somebody in the back office processing work. Now, if we look at this training, every new CSR that comes in costs around anywhere from 10 to 20,000 dollars to onboard. Yet attrition within the first year is, on average, 35 to 45%, so you basically are retraining and rehiring half of your staff every year, which is crazy. So think about the costs that impact the contact center for your organization - what would they do if you could solve for that? It's an incredibly huge feat, but something that Pega is absolutely capable of doing.

Another point is, think about all the applications. If you've ever walked or stepped inside a contact center, you'll see that these folks are swivel chairing back and forth, left and right all day long, going through legacy applications, going through different pieces of technology, going through knowledge management, all sorts of things, and on average they're switching 1,100 times a day from screen to screen. All while having to keep that customer happy and well executed, and make sure that they walk away with their solution resolved. It's very, very stressful, so lots of opportunity there with Pega Customer Service and how we can drive the behavior and change that and make it easier for the CSR.

Knowledge search. So, knowledge is huge if you're - especially if you're new or if you've just been released from training and you're on the floor. Maybe you get into a scenario that you're not sure of. So, what do they do? They go and they go to their knowledge management and they go to look to see how they get through that interaction. Or maybe to provide the customer more information. 36% of their day is spent looking for content across a variety of systems. 36% of their day. Imagine if you could take that 36%, bring it down to 0. The level of engagement that they would have with that customer on the other end would be incredible. Not only that, but you're making their job easier. They're being more satisfied. They're sticking around a lot longer. It's very important.

Now if you were to interview these frontline customer service representatives, most of them will tell you that they have bad desktop tools. I've done hundreds of operational walkthroughs throughout my career. I sat down with these people on the front lines and they will immediately tell you what isn't working, and what is not working, and 60% of agents claim that the technology that they're using is not sufficient to help customers. So, if you let that sink in, that's huge, right? 60% say that their tech is not sufficient to help customers.

Then, on top of that, KPI tracking inside the contact center, so - key performance indicators. This is what the contact center looks at to ensure that they are working healthily. They're making sure that 80% of the calls that are coming in - they're answered within 20 seconds. 80% of the chats are also answered within 20 seconds. 100% of those emails are turned around within 24 hours, and there's plenty more, trust me. There are 1,000,000 stats inside the contact center. But these are all things that agents struggle with while navigating the systems at the same time.

And it's not surprising that if we look at absenteeism, that 10% annually is the average absentee rate. So, we look at teams within the contact center, such as workforce management, that are in charge of scheduling and ensuring that agents are there to service the customers. It makes their jobs really difficult, and they have to build in all this padding to assume that 10% are going to be calling out, or sick, or the attrition rates. It's a very difficult job.

Pega Customer Service is uniquely positioned to come in there and champion the employees. This is all about making them empowered and making them successful. It's proactively suggesting the right knowledge articles. It understands the intent of that interaction. It walks them step by step by step through that interaction. And what do we have? We have happier, more engaged employees. And on top of that, that's a direct result that's going to go into the customer satisfaction scores.

The customers will recognize that they're focused on them, that they're not sifting through a million things, they're not distracted. And that's why Pega is so uniquely and strongly positioned to help solve for everything that you see on the screen.

I hope you enjoyed that. Thanks a lot, and tune in for more.

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