Agent Journey Mapping: the Secret to an Even Better Customer Experience?

Customer Experience (CX) remains top of the priorities list for many contact centre leaders as organisations strive to stand out from the competition.

Mapping customer journeys is a hot topic associated with improving CX. We’ve previously asked ‘Walk a mile in your customer’s shoes, where does it take you?‘ But what if the opportunities to improve CX are closer to home? What about the insight you can gain from your contact centre’s agents during this process?

Agent journey mapping is an area that is often overlooked when considering customer experience. But removing barriers to success for your agents is crucial if you want to provide superior customer service.

Read our consultants’ top tips for reviewing your agent journey and things to look out for.

Information Overload

Customers who call your contact centre tend to be frustrated before they even reach your agents. Especially if your IVR isn’t up to scratch, but that’s a whole other issue. If the agent then has to scrabble around for information while the customer waits, your CX will suffer.

Agents can easily become overloaded if they do not have a single connected view of information. And this can lead to inconsistent service.

An agent who has been with you for 6 weeks should find the system as easy to use as someone who has been with you for 6 years. If they don’t, the system is creating a barrier between them and the customer. Both suffer as a result.

Guiding Agents Without Scripts

We’ve all experienced those phone calls to a contact centre where agents are over-familiar, uninterested or too scripted. But have you ever thought what the agent goes through at that time? What systems they have to navigate through while still keeping the conversation going and ensuring their customer is happy.

You hire a contact centre agent because you feel they will do a great job. But getting tied up with difficult and distracting systems means that they are less able to allow their personality to shine through.

By offering simple and intuitive agent guidance, you free your agents up to be more ‘present’ in their phone calls. To actually listen to what customers talk about rather than just ‘padding’ the conversation until the systems catch up or they find the relevant info.

Look Beyond the Logistics

When embarking on process or journey mapping, don’t simply look at your technology or the logistics. You need to take into account the emotional and empathetic elements of the process.

Your customers don’t care about how your back-office processes work. They want to know where they are in the system. Automated updates are essential. Yet if the customer calls in, the agent will need to be able to tell them the situation clearly and concisely.

Customers who call in want reassurance. Agents need to be able to give that reassurance without battling the system.

Make sure you take into account wider communication channels such as social media, emails and website forms as well. These are vital in stitching together the true experience of both your agent and customer.

Time to Get Started

Not sure where to begin in mapping your agent journey? Our consultants give their top tips:

• Simply sit with your agents and observe their processes. This can give you enough information to make a good start. But make it clear that they are not under scrutiny. This may give you false results.
• Assign two separate teams to look at the Agent Journey and the Customer Journey – this provides focus and clarity.
• Assign a third team to look over the outcomes of the other two teams’ investigations.
• Then, elect representatives from all three teams to conduct a review and discuss moving the project forward.

To see how Eurotunnel approached their change project, listen to Netcall’s recent webinar ‘5 steps to implementing successful contact centre transformation’

Author: Guest Author