9 Must-have Skills for Contact Centre Agents Beyond 2023

Did you know that 81% of people claim that receiving good customer service makes them more likely to make another purchase? And yet, 61% of customers would leave for a competitor after just one negative experience.  

Instant gratification and instant resolution are what makes or breaks the customer. Customers aren’t going to think long term, that’s the duty of the business. Customers think linearly, and very quickly need to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Customer service is a critical differentiator for businesses, and if your customer support workforce is not equipped with the right platform and the right skill-set, then it will reflect poorly on the business and directly affect the revenue.  

The Power of Continuous Training - Why it Matters

In a world where 70% of the buying experience is based on how the customer is treated, continuous training of your support agents is not just important, it's essential. It's the secret sauce that keeps your customers coming back for more. Training equips your agents with the necessary skills to handle complex customer enquiries, adapt to new technologies, and deliver exceptional customer service consistently.

9 Must-Have Skills for Super Agents in 2023

1. Hear, Understand, and Act

Active listening is the cornerstone of effective communication. It's more than just hearing what the customer is saying; it's about understanding their needs, concerns, and emotions. It's about showing genuine interest in their words and responding in a way that makes them feel heard and valued.  

With CINNOX, your agents can leverage features like enquiry labelling, call recording and transcription to ensure they never miss any critical information during or after a conversation. This not only aids in problem-solving but also builds trust and rapport with customers.  ‍

2. Connect on a Human Level

The ability to put oneself in another's shoes is most critical to emerge as a customer support champion. Empathy is all about showing your customers that you genuinely care. When agents show empathy, they can turn a negative customer experience into a positive one.  

CINNOX's unified communication platform allows agents to communicate with customers through their preferred channels, to be accessible and available based on their convenience.

‍3. Juggle Tasks Like a Pro

In an omnichannel contact centre, all the communication channels, from digital to telephony are presented in a single interface. While agents don’t need to juggle between different tabs to switch from channel to channel, they still need to handle multiple enquiries, across multiple modes of communication. Being tech-savvy is not a luxury, it's a necessity.

CINNOX's robust analytics and reporting features ensures agents can identify common customer pain-points, devise effective strategies, and even prevent issues from occurring in the first place.  

CINNOX's all-in-one interface empowers agents to chat, call, send emails, and SMS, and even start a video call or conference call from the same dashboard.  

More importantly, our solution consolidates interaction data from various channels onto a single platform. This mitigates the risk of fragmented data residing in disconnected systems or personal devices, while also providing agents with a powerful workspace equipped with comprehensive data to enhance their service quality.

‍4. Be the Expert your Customers Need

Problem-solving is a critical skill for any customer support agent. It involves identifying the root cause of a problem, thinking critically, and finding effective solutions. Product knowledge is crucial for providing accurate information and resolving customer enquiries. Even beyond that, only when the customer support agents know the product well can they create an opportunity to up-sell or cross-sell upgrades or add-ons. This transforms your contact centre from a mere call centre to a colossal experience hub.  

CINNOX’s Open API and CRM integration enables you to connect your tech stack with our unified solution to ensure that your agents have all the information they need at their fingertips. With a connected tech stack, your support agents cannot just have visibility of the interaction history, but also the purchase history, unified customer identity across multiple apps and systems, behaviour and preferences, and much more, arming them with data that is crucial to personal the experience.

The more interactions you have with your customers, the easier it gets to understand their needs and preferences. Leverage the capabilities of conversational AI to understand customer intent accurately and respond quickly with relevant information and faster resolution with a connected knowledge base. By training the human-like AI Chatbot on your existing knowledge base, you can generate instant responses, use templates for auto-responses to common enquiries and leave the complex cases for your support agents to handle.

‍5. Turn Obstacles into Opportunities

Problem-solving is all about finding effective solutions to customer issues. It's about staying calm and composed even when dealing with the most difficult customers or complex issues.  

With CINNOX's advanced analytics and reporting features, your agents can identify patterns, anticipate problems, and proactively address them. By resolving a customer issue to their satisfaction in the quickest possible time, a support agent can even turn a distress call from customers into an opportunity.  

Your business can even leverage the value of network ID, which acts as a unique identifier that enables a deeper understanding of each customer's needs, to identify patterns by understanding your customers’ past behaviour, and preferences across various channels for your agents to be able to tailor their approach and provide more targeted assistance, and create a seamless and personalised customer experience.

‍6. Speak the Customer's Language

Effective communication is key to understanding and meeting customer needs. For example, when a customer reaches out to seek support, the communication platform should be able to direct the customer to an agent who speaks their language. It helps if the customer support agent is multilingual and is able to provide support to the customer in more than one language.  

CINNOX's system is able to detect a customer’s browser language and location and more, powered by its smart routing capabilities, customer enquiries always get directed to the most suitable support agents or service group based on their language capability. This way, businesses can scale their operations by globally setting up a virtual contact centre, without worrying about incurring mammoth costs of operations.

‍7. Maximising Productivity in Every Tick of the Clock

Constant exposure to high-stress situations can lead to burnout and exhaustion. Burnout can result in decreased productivity, lower job satisfaction, and even health problems. Not to say, it also increases the agent turnover rate.  

Agents often find themselves juggling a variety of tasks, many of which can be repetitive and mundane. These tasks, while necessary, can consume a significant amount of time and energy, detracting from the agent's ability to focus on their core responsibilities - providing exceptional customer service. This is where automation comes into play.

By automating routine tasks such as ticket categorisation, enquiry labelling, and answering basic customer enquiries, you can free up your agents to focus on what truly matters - creating better customer experiences.  

With CINNOX, you can easily train and deploy an AI-powered Chatbot to take care of the FAQs and even pre-qualify leads before passing them on to a human agent. Even when the customers call your phone line, CINNOX’s IVR system can guide them to the right support agent or destination following their inputs or key presses.

‍8. Embrace Change and Learn on the Go

As your omnichannel strategy evolves, so should your agents' skills. Remember, your agents are the superheroes of customer support. With the right training and tools, they can deliver an exceptional omnichannel customer experience.  

But businesses need to move away from traditional boardroom training practices when it comes to training their agents. With CINNOX, team leaders or managers do not need to base their training on historical data. Instead, they can supervise and train their agents on the go, by monitoring their chat interactions with customers and even intervening and taking over if they feel it necessary. This collaborative form of learning makes it easier to resolve complex customer issues while training agents live, on the job.

‍9. Collaborate to Deliver Excellent Support

Unlike a traditional call centre where customer support agents work in isolation, working in an omnichannel contact centre is a team sport. Every agent, manager, and cross-functional team member plays a vital role in delivering exceptional customer service. To succeed, an agent needs to not only learn how to engage with customers, but also how to engage with team members.

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CINNOX’s unified solution is designed to foster collaboration. It allows agents to easily label enquiries, refer customers to subject matter experts within the team, and collaborate on complex issues. This streamlined communication results in quicker problem resolution, which directly translates into happier customers.