What is a Contact Center Agent?
A contact center is a customer service function that handles customer contacts from multiple channels, which could include phone, chat, email, social media, and more. A contact center agent, also known as a customer service representative, is the front-line employee that interacts directly with customers and assists with issues such as placing orders, resolving billing issues and answering policy questions.
Contact center agents are often the only human contact a customer has with a business and therefore can have a significant influence on the customer experience. Since they play such a critical role, businesses need to hire well and train thoroughly. Successful contact center agents are empathetic, have great problem solving skills, and are skilled communicators. And because these agents may be multi skilled and handle more than one channel, contact center agents need to be flexible and adaptable.
Businesses need to provide their contact center agents with the tools and support needed to successfully assist customers. Upon hiring, this means training in both soft and hard skills. Once they reach the contact center floor, they need access to tools such as an intuitive agent interface, customer relationship management (CRM) applications and agent dashboards that enable them to monitor their own performance. Rounding out the support, contact center agents need to be competently managed, monitored, evaluated and scheduled.
Successful service operations recognize the importance of contact center agents and invest in making them successful. The customer experience depends on it.
How NICE can help
NICE CXone is the market leading call center software in use by thousands of customers of all sizes around the world to help them consistently deliver exceptional customer experiences. Our solutions help organizations train, manage and support contact center agents. CXone is a cloud native, unified suite of applications designed to help a company holistically run its call (or contact) center operations. CXone includes:
An easy-to-use omnichannel agent called MAX – My Agent eXperience that streamlines handling of contact center interactions, regardless of channel, as well as a choice of CRM Integrations that consolidate your customer context and contact center controls into a single interface, such as the NICE CXone Agent for Salesforce.
Omnichannel Routing – routing and interaction management that empowers agents to positively and productively interact with customers in digital and voice channels. These solutions include an automatic call distributor (ACD), interactive voice response (IVR), interaction channel support and proactive outbound dialer.
Workforce Optimization – unlocks the potential of your team by inspiring employees' self-improvement, amplifying quality management efforts to enhance customer experience and reducing labor waste. These solutions include workforce management (WFM), quality management (QM), reporting and performance management (PM).
Automation & Artificial Intelligence (AI) – leading-edge, intuitive technology that eliminates mundane tasks and speeds resolutions of customer issues for better business outcomes. It provides self-service, agent-assisted and fully automated alerts and actions.
CXone also includes pre-defined CRM integrations and UCaaS integrations with most leading solutions on the market. These integrations provide a holistic call center software solution capable of elevating customer experiences for companies of all sizes.