Providing exceptional customer support is critical to improving the experience of your customers. Contact center agents are the backbone of your customer service, and hiring the right or wrong agent can make all the difference to the quality of support you provide to your customers. If you’re looking to make a superstar team of contact center agents, here are the top qualities to look for.
The ability to retain knowledge
The objective of the best contact center software is to provide the best quality support and experience to customers. To achieve this, they need to know and remember a great deal of information about your company.
For instance, if the contact center agent is deployed for providing support for a particular product, he should be aware of the ins and outs of the product, along with the voice, tone, and philosophy of your brand.
Another essential piece of knowledge that contact center agents should have is to know what to do if they can’t resolve a query. It is not possible for a support executive to remember answers to each query.
In such cases, they should be able to quickly retrieve the information without making the customer wait for too long. Additionally, they should know who to transfer the call to in case the answer to the query is not available.
Paying attention to detail
Contact center agents often provide the same answer to all queries they receive. As a result, the problems of the customers aren’t resolved. To avoid this, make sure your agents pay close attention to the issue each customer is facing.
When hiring agents, look for those who seem to crave perfection. You can sense this by the way they present themselves in their resume and in real life.
Effective multitasking
A contact center is one of the few places where multitasking is considered to be a sign of efficiency. Contact center agents can be incredibly busy. They need to perform multiple tasks – attending customers, checking the knowledge base, and updating CRM – at once.
To make sure you achieve the desired levels of customer satisfaction, your agents should be organized and efficient.
Problem-solving
The job of a contact center agent is to solve the problems of the customers. So, it goes without saying that contact center agents should be great at solving problems. While most contact centers provide their agents with a script to follow, it might work only for common queries.
For instance, let’s say you offer SaaS-based antivirus services. One of your customers reports an issue that the antivirus software is crashing. This is a common problem that many users might face. So, you could train your agents to solve this particular query.
But some customers might run into miscellaneous problems. For example, one of your users might report that a type of malware has affected their system despite activating your software. Such issues would require in-depth understanding and creative problem-solving. So, look for contact center agents that have a demonstrated history of being champion problem solvers.
Adaptive and flexible
Resolving customer queries is no easy task. Contact center agents might handle hundreds of calls per day, and no two customers are identical. Some customers are easy to handle, whereas some might have challenging personalities. Agents should be flexible and be able to handle customers who are chatty, angry, and everyone in between.
Friendliness
In a customer-driven landscape, customer support is at the forefront of your brand. If your customers are not treated well, they’ll switch to another brand. So, make sure your agents are empathic, warm, and friendly. They should maintain a positive demeanor and focus on bringing a smile to your customers’ faces.
Ability to absorb pressure
The job of a contact center agent could be frustrating. Every day, they need to hear hundreds of frustrated, angry callers and make sure they end up happy and satisfied. Sometimes, customers can be ill-mannered and curt.
Handling such customers requires calmness and composure. Your contact center agents should not get disturbed or offended by impolite customers. Instead, they should understand their concerns and do their best to resolve them. And who knows, they might end up giving your brand a thumbs up.
Communication skills
Apparent but worth mentioning, a contact center agent’s job is to communicate with the customers, so their communication skills should be top-notch.
However, good communication skills include but are not confined to having good command over a particular language. It involves listening to the customer, digesting their problem, and providing the right solution promptly.
Contact center agents should avoid using business jargon and heavy vocabulary. They should speak clearly and use basic language.
Lastly, contact center agents need to also pay close attention to their tone and voice. If they sound flustered, worried, or in a rush, they’ll turn off the customers. So, make sure your agents always maintain a tone that is calm, caring, and friendly.
Ability to work fast
The best contact center agents are fast and efficient. They have limited time, in which they need to attend as many calls as possible without sacrificing quality. Besides, agents that work fast tend to provide customers with a better experience.
Callers don’t want to be on a call where the agent takes 15 minutes to retrieve information. They want their queries to be solved as soon as possible. So, fast-working agents could go a long way in enhancing the experience of your customers.
Creativity
Most people consider customer support as a field of work that requires no creativity or innovation. That’s untrue. Contact center agents need to come up with workable solutions for any issues thrown their way.
Since every customer is different, being creative is critical to ensure their queries are heard and resolved quickly. Being creative also increases customer satisfaction, as it makes customers feel they’re talking to a real human and not a service bot.
Emotional stability
As discussed, not every caller is friendly. A call center agent will deal with at least one customer who is exasperated and uncouth. But unlike real-life scenarios, giving it back to the callers is not an option.
An angry response to an enraged query can worsen the situation and taint the reputation of your brand. Thus, call center agents to need to keep their cool and look for ways to make the angry customer happy.
Conclusion
The number of contact center agents is increasing. They agree to work for cheap wages, which helps companies reduce their customer service costs.
But if you’re really serious about providing the best-quality support to your customers, look for agents that possess the skills mentioned above.
Here is one of the contact center software called voiptime which is a multi channel call center software.
