CX QA Live! | The Agent-Centric Customer Experience Show

Even in the toughest situations, your agents should handle every customer interaction with grace and compassion. What's the best way to do that? Well, if you're Sheri Kendall, you show your agents just that while you're coaching them. We're excited to bring back our resident training expert in this discussion where we'll highlight the benefits of coaching your agents with compassion.

[4:44 - 6:13] The employee experience is the beginning of everything, and the first part of the employee experience is a commitment to their whole human self. We need to start by lighting up the brain and finding out what matters to them in the workplace. After we’ve accomplished that, you can create a  coaching plan, like coaching with compassion. 

[11:59 - 14:32] Since business has taken a massive shift to being online, there need to be ways of having compassion with those who aren’t in the room. Even though it’s weird, a big part of this is making sure that when you are online, you have your camera on! If your goal is to build a connection, then being on camera is the correct move to make. 

[16:45 - 17:35] While the culture of making space for psychological safety is important, it’s Sheri’s mission to remind you that you matter! You can make a difference wherever your seat is. We don’t have to wait for the people at the top to make the change. 

[22:08 - 25:01] What we are not saying here is that compassion replaces business outcomes as the main goal. What we are saying is that one of the main ways of accomplishing the business outcomes that every business is looking for is by making sure that your employees feel compassion. It is our moral obligation to make sure that we are developing our employees.  

As always, thanks for tuning in! To listen to a recording of this and other episodes, visit vistio.io/podcasts. And to join our show live each week, go to vistio.io/cxlive.

What's the biggest issue that contact centers face? Go ahead and point to your favorite performance or quality metric, but the issue extends far beyond your data. The real issue is that agents are treated as "glorified" order takers. Your agents are the literal lifeblood of your contact center, and Nate Brown is going to take us back to school to teach us all just how much value your agents have and the strategic advantage they can provide to the organization as a whole.

[3:51 - 4:24] Agents should not be ticket takers. It may be part of their jobs, but there is so much more insight and connection that they have that they should do something greater with it. It’s important for agents and their leaders to know their worth. 

[10:54 - 12:02] We have successfully automated a lot of the transactional stuff, so now what we are left with are the complicated and creative interactions. These types of interactions can only be accomplished with agents. We need a great digital ecosystem that can give information to the agent so that they can help the customer in a way that only an agent can do.  

[18:36 - 20:24] If you are an agent who is hopping from contact center to contact center and remaining in a front line agent role, you need to get smarter and come into your power. Examine your interactions and find ways to go beyond this ticket-taking mode. You don’t have to be a leader to help the organization embrace new ideas.

[24:47 - 26:45] It’s all about time. We want to be generating long term values and if we are really looking at how we can generate more long term value in 2024, then that needs to happen at the CX level. 

As always, thanks for tuning in! To listen to a recording of this and other episodes, visit vistio.io/podcasts. And to join our show live each week, go to vistio.io/cxlive.

Let's be honest. Who aspires to be a contact center agent? It's a dead-end job that someone has to do in order for businesses to succeed... Except it's not! There are so many opportunities for agents to learn and develop into leadership roles. Lisa Guzman returns to the stage to show us how to embrace every skill and trait agents have that will transform them into the best leaders.

[ 2:36 - 3:14 ] Agents are sometimes viewed as replaceable and there is a certain level of attrition that it just accepted in customer service, but that’s actually a really big loss of knowledge.

[ 5:50 - 7:34 ] Agents can tell when they aren’t valued, but if you invest in them they’ll pay you back with their performance. Encourage them to be the CEO of their own career, and give them a track for career growth.  

[ 7:58 - 9:49 ] This human being is a very valuable asset. They know things you don’t know, and they talk to your customer all day. The contact center shouldn’t just be thought of as a cost. It’s a customer retention center. It’s an interface for the business and the customer. Q: How can we communicate this to leaders? A: Break down the silos that separate customer support from the other departments of the company.

[ 15:17 - 16:24 ] Agents are trained to look at their metrics. As they move into leadership roles they need to learn that there are less concrete ways to show their value. They either need to save the company money or make the company money. 

[ 17:40 - 18:08 ] Don’t be disappointed if your idea doesn’t pan out and the company doesn’t go with it. The important thing is that you’ve shown yourself as a thinker. 

[ 22:20 - 23:50 ] Should agents continue pursuing higher education to move up in a contact center?

Yes, empowering agents is the right thing to do morally, but it’s also the right thing to do for profitability. 

As always, thanks for tuning in! To listen to a recording of this and other episodes, visit vistio.io/podcasts. And to join our show live each week, go to vistio.io/cxlive.

You can train your agents on your knowledge base, your process, and your entire system, but how do you train them to actually handle a call? Do you just send them into the queue with your fingers crossed? Heck no! We're joined with the Brohawk himself, Mark Brody as we explore why simulated customer interactions can help sharpen those ever-important soft skills agents need.

[3:11 - 4:28] The number one reason why call simulations matter is because the mock calls that you do in training are just not good enough. We need to be able to simulate what the environment is going to be like when we don’t have training wheels on. 

[9:52 - 11:38] One of the biggest shortcomings of mock calls is the inability to build empathy. The mock calls are very focused on how calls can be managed from a green path, but call simulations focus on coming to the right resolution for that customer. 

[15:24 - 17:39] The importance of having an agent at the point of resolution so that the customer can have confidence in your brand's ability to resolve the customer's conflict is much more impactful than what any AI can accomplish. 

[21:00 - 22:56] Knowledge makes all the difference in a contact center. Your agent’s knowledge is only as good and accurate as their knowledge base is. So companies need to focus on knowledge alignment to develop the most experienced agents. 

As always, thanks for tuning in! To listen to a recording of this and other episodes, visit vistio.io/podcasts. And to join our show live each week, go to vistio.io/cxlive.

What happens when you combine Rob Dwyer's "Next in Queue" with our weekly live discussion? You get ALL the value and twice the Rob! Make sure to join us for this very special episode of "CX QA Live!"

[6:02 - 7:21] Put on your ears and really listen. It’s too easy as an agent to just get into the motions and not listen to what the other person is saying, but when we actually listen, we can build a rapport and a connection. 

[9:28 - 10:51] In a contact center world, we often look for experience, but experience is not the most critical thing that a person can bring to a role. There are other skills and qualities that can be found beyond the contact center that should be looked at. 

[18:45 - 20:09] Understanding how your customer is feeling and how the agent is representing themselves and the company is changing how we look at agent performance. There are always going to be metrics, and those are important, but we are on the cusp of where we can start to measure the human factor. 

[25:17 - 26:23] The culture in an organization starts at the top. If the executives in a company are not fostering a culture then it won’t exist. So as leadership in a company, what are you focusing on and are you building the environment that you want? 

As always, thanks for tuning in! To listen to a recording of this and other episodes, visit vistio.io/podcasts. And to join our show live each week, go to vistio.io/cxlive.

Where do you see the contact center of the future? Is everything self-service; are all agents just hyper-intelligent AI; are we handling CX in VR? In a "pre-GPT" era, we asked Thomas Laird these kinds of questions and we are long overdue for an update. Make sure to tune in and see the future with us together!

[3:34 - 5:44] As we look further into the future, it is very likely that we will see a monstrous impact of AI on agents. This impact will likely cause a shift in skills needed for working, but it will also be used as a tool to help make the workload possible. 

[12:03 - 12:53] AI will make QA a done deal. The automation of QA forms using AI is something that is coming soon and it will likely replace QA. 

[19:28 - 20:17] We have the choice now to fully automate our system, but most people do not want that. You need to look at what an agent wants, what a supervisor wants, and what a call center wants.  

[25:37 - 26:32] The future of the contact center will be fully immersed in AI. It is likely that there will be a head count drop of 20-25% of agents, because of the improvements that AI can make. 

As always, thanks for tuning in! To listen to a recording of this and other episodes, visit vistio.io/podcasts. And to join our show live each week, go to vistio.io/cxlive.

We're in for a treat today! We covered a lot of ground the last time we spoke with Sheri Kendall, but we've still got even more to go! AI and agent training feels especially topical in today's market, so we're diving back into the discussion and finding even more rabbit holes to go down that will help contact center leaders think about the relationship between agents and AI.

[2:41 - 3:50] There are around 100 AI tools that can assist with efficiency. Some of these tools can even help improve coaching, so that we can provide ourselves with new knowledge and growth. 

[10:01 - 11:16] The AI tools need the training and information that we put into it, so we need to be very thoughtful about what information we are putting into it. The AI is interacting with both your employees and your customers, so we need to be aware of what it knows. 

[15:55 - 16:30] The reality is that if you don’t have agents thinking of working with you as part of their career, then they are going to have a lot of fear around being replaced. You don’t want your agents thinking this way, because you need their skills and intelligence to train the AI.

[16:58 - 18:08] If your agents are worried about losing their jobs to AI, then we would encourage the leaders and organizations to really consider how AI can enhance their jobs rather than replace. If your agents are focused on the fear of losing their jobs then the quality of customer service is going to go down. 

[19:34 - 22:16] With the increased chances of emergency situations with a natural disaster, we need to be proactive. We need to have contingency plans put in place and know how to support our agents through these situations. 

As always, thanks for tuning in! To listen to a recording of this and other episodes, visit vistio.io/podcasts. And to join our show live each week, go to vistio.io/cxlive.

If you have a contact center, you're sitting on a goldmine of customer insights. Everyone knows that! What you may not realize is you also are able to get direct feedback from the people who deal with your process everyday. Longtime friend of the show and now our featured guest, Chafik Abdellaoui is here to share his ideas and experiences in attaining and applying this feedback in the contact center.

[ 7:50 - 8:25 ]  When you have a call center with an environment that is separated it’s harder to make sure that leaders actually receive the feedback from the reps and agents. Alternatively, when everybody reports to the leader, the feedback is implemented more quickly and more easily. 

[ 11:15 - 13:47 ]  As a former agent who is now in a leadership role Chafik is convinced that the fewer barriers to feedback, the better. In feedback sessions and “town halls” the bulk of the time needs to be given to the front lines so they can share their feedback. 

[ 13:56 - 14:41 ]  Remain connected. Listen to calls, whatever role you are in. And better yet, go a step further by doing shadowing sessions every quarter. 

[ 16:37 - 20:40 ]  Agent feedback is priceless, but businesses make decisions using numbers. So where is the balance when you’re operating at a large scale? Make sure you’re shadowing agents from a variety of performance levels so the metrics are helpful in going head to head against the numbers.

[ 27:26 - 28:38 ]  People saying that something is a good idea is not real buy-in. The truth is, we just tend to be agreeable and often offer verbal support of ideas. It’s about actually seeing value and working together on the right ideas that deserves buy-in.

As always, thanks for tuning in! To listen to a recording of this and other episodes, visit vistio.io/podcasts. And to join our show live each week, go to vistio.io/cxlive.

Many would argue that business is all about sales and playing the numbers game. Guess what? They're wrong. The truth is, without customers, there is no business. Join us, along with Philip Bennett, as we reveal why focusing on customer experience agents is vital to servicing, not just your customers, but quite literally everyone.

[ 3:57 - 4:29 ] What does your customer get when they choose you over your competitor? They get YOU!

[ 10:34 - 11:43 ] My job as the manager is to assign the credit and take the blame.

[ 11:56 - 14:09 ] We say ‘Fail hard, fail fast.’ But do we really allow people to do that? Or do we punish them? Management literally pays for agent’s to make mistakes We’re paying for their education so let’s keep them around so we can benefit from that! Kenneth adds “The leader takes the bullet. The team takes the glory.” That’s real buy-in and leadership. 

[ 16:54 - 18:12 ] What should CEOs say when they are asked the question, “What keeps you awake at night?” I never hear them answer the way I think they should. They should say, “What keeps me up at night is that the very person who talks to my customer, representing my company, using my voice, is the person who everyone in the company is trying to downsize, automate or outsource.” That’s the biggest shame in the world.  

[ 22:05 - 23:35 ] Asking front line agents for ideas is one of the best things you can do.

[ 24:55 - 25:04 ] It’s the small ideas that are the great ones to implement, not the big, flashy ones.

[ 26:32 - 29:14 ] After AI comes into the call center we may even need more agents because volume will increase, automation will take care of mundane tasks and agents will be needed for more intricate calls. 

Let’s remember that everyone is a customer, and customer experience is everything to our company.

As always, thanks for tuning in! To listen to a recording of this and other episodes, visit vistio.io/podcasts. And to join our show live each week, go to vistio.io/cxlive.

CSAT. NPS. AHT. Nearly every contact center has held their agents accountable for metrics like this to evaluate success. Does everyone really understand the values behind the measurements, or do we all just go along with it because it's “the way it’s always been done"? We've got Doug Rabold in the hot seat, helping us realize the true merit of metrics and how they can impact agent performance for better... or worse.

[6:21- 7:24] It’s important in any environment where you are looking at different metrics and various key performance indicators to look at them holistically. Each piece impacts another piece leading to a different performance. 

[10:39- 11:29] When a customer is calling in and they have a policy problem with how the company is treating the customer, there is nothing the agent can do about it. The agent could be fantastic, but if the policies are anti-customer then you aren’t going to figure that out with certain measurements. 

[14:12- 15:56] The biggest limitation of the metrics being used is how they only survey those who are consuming the service. They do not survey those who have given up on the service. These perspectives are just as necessary, if not more, in how to measure the service.

[20:58- 22:16] There are the five questions that you can ask to better improve your surveying, to make sure all opinions are heard and your company can grow. The areas that you’d want to ask questions about are quality, speed, technical ability, approachability, and communication. 

As always, thanks for tuning in! To listen to a recording of this and other episodes, visit vistio.io/podcasts. And to join our show live each week, go to vistio.io/cxlive.