If you walk around a call center and ask what agent performance issues are prevalent, you’ll often hear the same things: Lack of agent knowledge, lack of attention, difficulty navigating systems, and lack of agent empowerment.
But, what can we do to improve these areas? Lots of things.
Today, we’re going to focus on CRM and specifically Salesforce.com. By giving agents and supervisors tools to combat common issues, we can improve agent performance, and make collaboration less of a pain point in the organization.
With Salesforce.com, we solve many issues related to these things all at once.
Knowledge is a powerful tool that can be tailored to present relevant articles to agents based on relevant case status and contact information. The escalation process for chat, phone, and email avenues is also greatly improved by leveraging Omni-Channel routing. The increased, yet efficient, communication allowed by Chatter within and between departments does wonders for a call center’s culture.
With the new Lightning Experience, we can shorten clicks per action, sometimes cutting them in half or more. With custom coding, many agent processes can be automated, allowing your agents to focus on the customer and let the software do the heavy lifting. This not only improves the agent experience and thus employee retention, but it improves efficiency and allows you to backfill less of your attrition.
With Chatter (a method to comment on records to other users), Omni-Channel, and simple yet recognizable notifications, agents are easily and quickly able to gain supervisor approvals without a long hold process. Reminders can also be set by agents or automatically generated based on business rules.
There are a great many factors that go into agent retention, but CRM is one of the best tools that can be used to combat it. It can help your agents perform, make their daily experience better, and help them feel empowered and attentive.
Salesforce.com does Call Center CRM better than anyone else, and for the first time you can truly integrate your CRM into the rest of your business’s system of record. Alternative Solutions Consulting is the industry expert you can trust to make these integrations work.
Spencer Gibson, Alternative Solutions Salesforce.com and Customer Life-Cycle Management Consultant