The hard truths about agent soft skills and customer satisfaction

When it comes to agent soft skills, there are some hard truths that contact center leaders must learn. The first hard truth is that soft skills make a huge impact on customer satisfaction and cannot be ignored. Time spent on improving agent soft skills is always time well spent.

The second hard truth is that it’s impossible for supervisors to manually evaluate a sufficient sample size of interactions to objectively measure agent performance. A small sample size of interactions will almost always be skewed, and that’s not even mentioning the bias that creeps in when humans evaluate interactions.

There are effective methods of improving and evaluating soft skills. But first, consider the evidence.

The hard truth of soft skills and happy customers

It’s truly incredible the strong connection between agent soft skills and customer satisfaction. In fact, our recent State of CX research report lays out this connection clearly. We analyzed over a billion CX interactions to tease out critical CX insights every CX leader should know. And this is one of them—the better your agents can bring a human touch and empathy to interactions, the happier your customers will be.

We broke it down even further—the more types of positive soft skills your agents demonstrate, the happier customers are. This includes behaviors such as building rapport, acknowledging loyalty, being empathetic, and demonstrating ownership. If this isn’t a strong validation of the power of agent soft skills, then nothing else is. Or as I like to say, “the proof is in the pudding.”

Companies can achieve this uptick in customer satisfaction by emphasizing soft skill behaviors over mere process and technical training. Delivering company policy in a monotone voice, with no empathy towards the customer’s plight, doesn’t make anybody feel better. That’s true even if the agent’s chosen words are otherwise correct and prompt. The human touch really matters. In other words, it’s much more than simply saying a canned type sounding response such as “I understand” or “I can see how that would make you feel”.

The hard truth of manual evaluations

For a long time, the only feasible way to evaluate agent performance was for a supervisor to manually review a handful of interactions. This small sample was often randomly chosen, and so they could easily be skewed to the positive or negative, just based on chance. Furthermore, the supervisor would have their own natural biases in assessing the interactions, so the evaluation, in the end, could be downright unfair. At worst, this practice could lead to job dissatisfaction, a high number of quality score disputes, and insufficient insight into customer satisfaction trends.

But now with the power and scale of AI, supervisors can have every single agent interaction analyzed. And with AI doing the work, the evaluations are objective. CXone Mpower for Customer Satisfaction does exactly this, using a consistent measuring stick for agents’ soft skills. Contact center leaders can easily understand agent performance on an individual and aggregate level and improve customer satisfaction.

Enlighten AI can make soft skill evaluation a breeze

Enlighten AI is the brain behind customer satisfaction that drives exceptional CX outcomes with ease. Enlighten AI uses natural language processing and machine learning to analyze customer interactions across channels. It detects language nuances, identifies emotional cues, and categorizes sentiment accurately and quickly, offering a real-time view of how to improve all customer interactions.

Sentiment is a measure of a customers’ emotions towards your product or service, and it can capture the full spectrum of customer feelings, opinions, and perceptions across all interactions and touchpoints. Sentiment scoring is a proven predictive indicator of customer satisfaction such as NPS and CSAT surveys.

NICE CXone Mpower Customer Satisfaction scores agents on nine different behaviors that directly impact the sentiment score, so that companies can better understand their customers’ thoughts and feelings across the board and make data-driven decisions.

With the ability to measure sentiment in real-time, businesses can also take action to improve the interaction while it’s happening, instead of after, meeting customers’ needs while they are already engaged with the brand. Personalized insights guide agents on how to improve the interaction—from more empathy to active listening to taking ownership in order to support the customer.

NICE CXone Mpower CSAT make customers happy at top companies

Leading businesses succeed with CXone Mpower CSAT, and it proves this is a surefire method to please customers.

Open Network Exchange (ONE) started using CSAT by homing in on four specific agent behaviors—demonstrating ownership, active listening, building rapport, and effective questioning—to better understand how those behaviors are tied to customer frustration, sentiment, and silent time during interactions.

Within 90 days of implementing CSAT, the company shifted the way it coaches agents, saving an average of four to five hours of time per supervisor per week. Supervisors have insight into coaching opportunities for each individual agent, each team, and globally for the entire contact center. Rather than relying on QA evaluations as they did in the past, they can quickly search by specific categories or behaviors, such as frustrated contacts or calls where agents received a negative score for effective questioning.

Republic Services started over their quality program from scratch once leadership put customer experience front and center as a top priority. The company sought to modernize operations to get past manual workflows and find opportunities for automation to improve the agent experience.

Adding CSAT and interaction analytics provided Republic Services with the insights to create next-level, data-driven strategies for quality management and customer experience. While previous sentiment analysis was limited to empathy and tone, Enlighten AI automatically scored nine agent soft-skill behaviors that are critical to improving customer zeal, including acknowledging customer loyalty and value.

Improved metrics resulted in a short time. Republic Services increased the number of coached actions by over 120% in just three months after going live. A renewed focus on the customer enabled Republic Services to reduce its negative to extremely negative sentiment in approximately six months.

Kaiser Permanente, a leading healthcare provider and not-for-profit health plans in the United States, made great strides in improving customer sentiment year-over-year in their pharmacy’s agent teams. They implemented CSAT and Real-Time Interaction Guidance to streamline several components of the in-call and post-call experience for customers, agents, and supervisors alike. The added features supported the pharmacy’s aggressive service level and handle time targets, boosting customer sentiment across the board.

With automated intent analysis across all calls, Kaiser Permanente’s pharmacy enjoyed significantly improved insights into root causes and call drivers. Enlighten AI-driven soft skills analysis eliminated seven manual review items from the call QA process, freeing up time for coaches to focus on workflow adherence and other sophisticated business considerations. In turn, member satisfaction and retention improved because key sources of dissatisfaction and frustration were identified and proactively addressed.

The ultimate truth

There are some hard truths about soft skills that can’t be ignored. But—working with this reality doesn’t have to be hard. NICE Enlighten AI and CXone Mpower CSAT can make the assessment and development of soft skills for your agents doable and successful. All while proving that soft skills truly can be taught if properly identified and coached—without bias.

Dig in deeper to the connection between agent soft skills and customer happiness in our State of CX report. We think you’ll find the evidence you want to strengthen your programs for developing agent soft skills.