Benefits of Agent Empowerment

Agent empowerment is becoming an increasingly popular term amongst contact centres and anyone in a customer service related position. If you’re not familiar with agent empowerment, it’s essentially giving agents the responsibility and autonomy to make key decisions when interacting with customers.

The concept is gaining rapid traction in the contact centre world – and for a good reason. Companies who empower their customer service agents will see a huge leap in their team’s performance. If you’re still wondering why you should care about agent empowerment, consider some of these major benefits.

Sense of Ownership

When agents have the power to make things right with a dissatisfied customer, they’ll feel a strong sense of ownership with every customer interaction. This ensures that in every call your agents are fully engaged with the customer, and that all possible solutions will be explored before escalating calls.

Better Customer Service

Your agents will go above and beyond for your customers, and they’ll be able to handle customer enquiries faster with the right level of permissions in place. When your agents are fully in control, you can be confident that your customers are in great hands.

Improved Morale

Empowered agents = happy agents. When agents are micromanaged or have little authority to help customers, they are much more likely to report high levels of job dissatisfaction. But when agents have the power to do whatever it takes to resolve a customer issue, your centre’s morale will significantly improve.

Happier employees stay in their role longer, which can make a big difference for companies struggling with high attrition.

Enable Continuous Improvement

Usually, employees in a management role or higher are the ones writing and updating your customer service processes. Many companies forget that it’s the agents who work the most closely with customers, and that they often have great ideas on how to improve processes and create better customer interactions.

Empowering agents to make or suggest changes to your company’s library of processes will enable continuous improvement for your entire team.

Improve Your Whole Cycle of Data

Agent empowerment will improve employees’ confidence, and allow them to perform to the best of their ability. With nothing holding them back, you’ll see dramatic improvements in your contact centre’s whole cycle of data.

This blog has been re-published by kind permission of ProcedureFlow

Author: Robyn Coppell