While AI and automation are valuable to customer service, they’re not always relevant to every single part of the customer journey. When it comes to complex or sensitive inquiries, customers are still seeking to talk to a human agent.
“Many reports show that people still prefer talking to a person than to a machine,” notes Girish Dharmaraj, Head of Product at Toku.
“Even though AI makes agents’ lives much easier, human interaction is still significant”
For companies, this means they need to invest in empowering their agents to be able to provide that sought-after human touch.
“Empowering a customer service team means making sure every agent can make decisions based on actionable insights, rather than relying on their supervisors or managers for approval,” Girish Dharmaraj explains.
To be able to do that, companies need to make sure that every agent has the proper tools and critical insights to provide the ultimate customer experience.
The Challenge: Keeping It Simple
When it comes to empowering agents, the main challenge is keeping things as simple and easy-to-use as possible.
“Most agents are not super tech-savvy, so the ease of using the tool in front of them is extremely important,” Girish Dharmaraj explains.
“Another reason is employee churn is particularly high in the contact center industry. As employees constantly come and go, companies need tools and platforms that could be easily taught to newcomers.”
What are the top contact center features to help maintain that intuitive simplicity, empowering agents to provide top-notch CX?
Click to call
A simple feature that can make agents’ life much easier is ‘click to call,’ where a browser extension is used to allow agents to click a number – whether in the CRM or anywhere else online – and have the system automatically dial it.
“This effectively means a minimum of training for agents, since they don’t even need to know how to copy, paste, or switch between tabs. It saves time and prevents mistakes that can be caused by dialing the wrong number,” Girish Dharmaraj notes.
Sentiment Analysis
Another key feature for empowering agents is sentiment analysis, where both agents and supervisors can get intuitive indications on the customer’s feeling.
“When there’s a huge call volume coming in, it’s almost impossible to go through each and every recording and really understand what’s happening,” Girish Dharmaraj explains.
“With sentiment analysis, agents are informed during the conversation whether it’s positive, neutral or negative, and make changes accordingly in real time. A supervisor can also use this information to help the agent improve as part of their training process.”
CRM Integration
CRM integration can be extremely helpful to empower agents, too.
“It’s basically an integration with the call center, bringing the dial pad inside the CRM – so the information flows both ways,” Girish Dharmaraj says.
“This way, all calls are logged in the CRM, and one of the biggest advantages is that the agent is able to view the customer’s history for better context.”
Whispering
‘Whispering’ is a unique feature, enabling CC supervisors to listen in on agents’ conversations and provide advice discretely if they choose.
“During a live conversation, a supervisor can join and listen online. If the agent struggles at any given point, the supervisor can choose to jump in and take over, or ‘whisper’ answers to the agent without the customer knowing.”
Toku‘s Contact Center Solution
As a seasoned provider of business communication solutions, Toku chose to take a highly pragmatic approach to ensure that their contact center solution is scalable and easy to use for agents.
“The Toku Contact Center solution aims to be a one-stop-shop solution for business scaling their operations in APAC,” Girish Dharmaraj shares.
“We offer all the critical contact center features; take care of the APAC connectivity layer, saving customers the trouble of dealing with regulatory complexity; and provide them with the relevant Communication APIs, allowing to integrate the contact center data with their in-house analytics tools”
You can learn more about Toku’s contact center solution here.
