In the final weeks of summer, I’m inclined to enjoy every moment – spending as much time as possible basking in the warm weather and taking advantage of the longer days while they’re still around. Another way to hang onto summer is by putting into heavy rotation a playlist with anthems that capture the essence of summer.
With the recent death of Olivia Newton-John, the “Grease” soundtrack quickly rose to the top – namely the “Summer Nights” duet with John Travolta where they sing about “summer days drifting away” and not wanting to see “summer dreams ripped at the seams” among other things.
Summer coming to a close also means 2022 is more than half over. That reminds me of the big plans I had at the beginning of summer—and how time is indeed drifting away.
The good news for businesses is they should feel empowered that they have time. They can redirect their energies to do something to keep their best employees—with 52% of voluntarily exiting employees saying their manager or organization could have done something to prevent them from leaving their job. That’s even better news for budgets because US businesses are losing $1 trillion a year due to voluntary turnover.
In case you missed it, below is a list of the top 10 webinars, reports, white papers and eBooks of 2022 (so far) to quickly get up to speed in preparation for the busy upcoming shopping season. End summer on a high note by checking out these resources filled with tips and best practice examples for planning a successful onboarding process, and continued employee engagement.
Reports and White Papers
1. Report: Blueprint to help contact centers find purpose
Research shows there’s a direct correlation between how businesses treat agents and how they will treat customers. Businesses that make sure to deliver the right tools, coaching, and management achieve agent staying power—and better overall customer satisfaction.
This report from ContactBabel, a leading analyst firm, offers guidance toward a purpose-fueled workforce.
Among the most insightful findings:
- Decision-makers see technology as a critical way to inform and empower agents to work more effectively.
- Improved knowledge management applications topped the list of contact center leaders’ three factors that could improve agent performance by accessing the necessary tools to solve customer issues more immediately.
- Supporting agents through a unified desktop and robotic process automation (RPA) decreases repetitive and painstaking work involved in searching through multiple applications and databases, as well as after-work calls.
2. Toolkit: Stop agent turnover
PwC reports that 65% of employees are looking for a new job and 88% of executives say they are seeing higher turnover than normal. Better understanding the “why” behind agent turnover is a good first step to stemming the tide of resignations.
According to Gartner, more than 90% of organizations view CX as their primary source of differentiation so they focus on providing exceptional customer experiences while often losing sight of offering that same level to their own employees.
Creating a successful agent experience (AX) program is about building relationships and understanding their needs. Identifying ways to increase agent job satisfaction is the key to retention.
The Agent Experience Maturity Toolkit will help pinpoint how to become an employer of choice by setting the stage for a rewarding work environment. The toolkit will help businesses evaluate and better align four critical areas: people, process, technology, and key metrics.
Using this toolkit makes it easier to assess a contact center team’s level of AX maturity to identify improvement opportunities as they happen. That puts businesses in a better position to step in to address problems in real time rather than let them fester—and possibly multiply.
3. White Paper: Stop the madness: How to reduce the risk of agent churn and improve retention
More tips to keep agents engaged can be found in our white paper on reducing the risk of agent churn. Developed with innovation speaker Braden Kelley, the resource tackles those challenges facing businesses in retaining their talent pool of agents as the post-pandemic Great Resignation (or rather the Great Discontent) continues. Factors like early retirement, renewed demand for flex and remote work, and rising expectations are behind the trend.
A 2021 Gallup report also found that most employees aren’t engaged or are actively disengaged, finding an employee engagement rate of only 34% in the U.S. and Canada. Allowing employees to reach this point just isn’t good business sense. Lost productivity of actively disengaged and otherwise not engaged employees equals roughly 18% of their annual salary, where replacing these workers would cost between one half and two times this same salary.
The white paper offers a dashboard for businesses looking to reverse resignations with seven actionable ways to reduce employee churn.
Webinars
4. Webinar: Start using smart self-service for customer (and agent) retention and loyalty
While 81% of consumers expect an immediate response to customer service inquiries, just 40% of businesses think they can meet this demand. That’s where businesses can better step up. Consumers are more likely to search the web, a company website or mobile app first. Smart self-service is the difference between leaving customers feeling like an issue is out of their control—and putting them in the driver’s seat so they feel like an expert.
During this webinar, Liaison, a higher education technology firm, shared more about how CXone’s smart self-service tool—CXone Expert content management—has been its contact center’s best asset in meeting this demand.
Its so-called “one-stop shop” website portal wasn’t living up to its name. If anything, it had become more like a meandering road trip involving multiple stops for consumers to find what they needed. Without a centralized process for updating necessary higher education application materials, applicants were getting outdated ones.
Through the creation of a knowledge management framework, the company activated a single source of truth to make sure college applicants had all the relevant content at their fingertips. For every six applicants needing help, five of them are served by self-service so agents can better focus on customer requests that require more assistance.
As Liaison’s representative explained, “It was a really heavy lift but at the same time it was easy because of how CXone Expert works. We could build help centers in two hours versus taking days to do that.”
5. Webinar: Three ways to make a contact center an employer of choice
While the onboarding process can be overwhelming and isolating for new employees, there are solutions to make the transition smoother. Further creating challenges for new employee onboarding is the recent shift to work from anywhere. In fact, a poll of participants in a recent NICE CXone webinar found more than 45% of agents are fully remote with an additional 24% responding they have a hybrid schedule, where some time is spent remote.
To truly become an employer of choice, a contact center must find a way to efficiently address and mitigate these challenges. An estimated 85% of people who feel they can be productive everywhere say they plan to stay with the company for a long time, so businesses should craft an experience that’s customized for the new remote workforce and reinforces agents’ newly acquired skills.
We talked with RingCentral, a provider of cloud-based business communications solutions, about WEM solutions that could remove friction to give agents more tools to find better solutions to customer problems—ultimately winning the onboarding process.
Agents have a lot of tools to toggle between—sometimes as many as eight different apps—and that causes an unnecessary distraction when their focus should be on helping customers and meeting their expectations for a quick turnaround on their issue. To be an employer of choice, businesses should offer a unified way to view everything they need for a first-contact resolution without the burden of extra work.
6. Webinar: How to avoid the breakup and be an employer of choice
Agents face myriad challenges in their day-to-day lives. For example, 30% of participants in recent NICE CXone webinars say dealing with legacy technology or complicated processes is a top challenge and 28% cite wanting flexibility in when or where they work.
Technology is a big part of our lives, and when technology falls short for agents, they're likely to leave.
To have an engaged and empowered workforce, companies need to start on Day 1 by creating an onboarding process that can meet this demand. Only 12% of employees strongly agree that their organization does a great job of onboarding. This is something organizations can address to improve morale and increase retention.
Modern contact center employees are savvier than ever. They’ve come of age in the time of a gig economy so they crave flexibility and want to be able to work from anywhere and have the option to work part time and pick their shift times so they can better control their own schedules.
An agent can be freed from doing manual, more mundane tasks with robotic process automation (RPA), which can do that lifting for them by cueing up information such as why the customer called and prompting knowledge articles to respond with authority to the question at hand.
7. Webinar: Tips to create an omnichannel strategy for seamless customer journeys
Maximizing the full power of CXone to drive customer engagement across the entire digital journey should be a priority for businesses today. Customers want the ability to interact with companies leveraging a variety of channels—such as email, chat, SMS, social media—not just by phone.
Offering customers multiple channels for customer service is one thing, where omnichannel customer service goes beyond. When we talk about omnichannel customer service, we’re talking about seamless connections to allow customers to move effortlessly between channels during their CX journey. After all, frustrated agents too often lead to unsatisfied customers—and vice versa.
Learn more about how CXone can provide businesses with an omnichannel strategy using a single application to handle interactions across all channels, offering a quicker path to meaningful, effortless interactions to help customers solve problems quickly and correctly.
Watch the 10-minute webinar now.
8. Webinar: Tips to improve remote agent onboarding and training
Organizations with a strong onboarding process improve new hire retention by 82% and productivity by 70%. That’s significant and worth taking a closer look at, as this CRM magazine web event does.
Many organizations say the onboarding process is less than 30 days, as nearly 49% responded in our webinar poll. Training employees with the tools they need in that amount of time requires an organized ramp-up process.
We all know how a positive first experience sets the stage for loyal customers. Formalizing a remote-friendly experience allows agents to feel a part of the culture. Beyond offering communication and feedback early in the onboarding process, another way to encourage a sense of belonging is by offering employees a way to positively contribute. On the flip side, not feeling prepared can weigh down any sense of enthusiasm or pride in work they may feel.
Getting agents on track to feel productive can be achieved through automating routine tasks and giving them one place to access their tech tools means they can spend less time training and more time helping customers.
Access tips now in the on-demand webinar.
9. Webinar: Take the next step in empowering customers with AI-powered self-service
With statistics showing one-third of the workweek is currently spent on unimportant tasks, there’s definitely room to grow. A traditional approach to CX is failing to capture all the opportunities available to meet customer needs along their digital journey.
Agents feel the void, too. Nearly half of workers say they're likely to leave their current job if they’re unhappy or frustrated with workplace tech.
Customers are looking for the right tech, too. About 85% of customers try to solve their own issues via a Google search before even reaching out to a contact center. Reaching customers closer to the need event delivers on CXi, creating frictionless experiences by assisting customers wherever their journey begins. By enabling a quicker path to self-service for them, agents also benefit.
In 10 minutes, this webinar takes a quick dive into how artificial intelligence has made workforce management applications even more effective and accurate.
eBook
10. eBook: Be the employer of choice: How feedback fosters agent purpose
How can businesses create an experience and environment for agents that inspires them, so they can in turn inspire customers? Offer agents constructive feedback.
There are several takeaways in this eBook we developed with Experience Investigators CEO and industry expert Jeannie Walters, including more on how delivering feedback builds avenues of communication that energize employees’ sense of purpose. In fact, a sense of purpose—or lack thereof—impacts engagement, job satisfaction, how they treat their customers, and overall productivity.
By closing the feedback loop, businesses can help agents be the champions they are. This eBook offers a number of tips for identifying problem areas and working through them to emerge with a stronger CX strategy by:
- Modeling the experience customers should have.
- Providing a clear mission and goals.
- Coaching with real-time feedback.
- Engaging with them for feedback to improve the customer experience.