Best digital customer experience

How to help agents give the best digital customer experience.

Digital customer service is in demand by consumers who seek convenience and interaction methods similar to those they use in their everyday lives. Businesses are answering these demands by offering digital support channels like chat, text (SMS), and social media. This has changed the face of customer service by putting consumers more in control of how they communicate with organizations.

Just because it's called "digital," however, doesn't mean there isn't human interaction involved. In fact, agent-assisted channels provide some of the best digital customer experience. Channels like chat and email have high satisfaction scores and are among the most preferred. They offer the convenience of digital along with the reassurance of professional assistance.

Because they play such an important role in ensuring consumers have the best digital customer experience possible, contact center agents need to be positioned for success.

This typically means the following:

Comprehensive and effective training.

The onboarding of new agents usually includes a lot of training on software and company policies, and rightfully so. But agents also need training on softer skills, like how to de-escalate tense situations and how to be first-class problem solvers. Additionally, because digital support conversations are mostly written, agents need to be trained on how, for example, to communicate with short phrases without sounding rude; or how to best represent the brand on social media. Organizations who don't skimp on initial and ongoing agent training are well on their way to providing the best digital customer experience they can.

Culture of excellence

Agent experience (AX) is receiving a lot of focus from companies that realize the important role agents play in delivering the best digital customer experience. Much of AX comes down to culture. A business culture that treats agents like professionals and holds them to high standards should foster high quality results. To encourage agents to take more ownership of their performance, businesses can provide them with tools like agent dashboards so they can see how they and their teams are performing against KPIs.

Top-notch tools

By "tools," we mostly mean software. Digital agents are frequently multi-skilled, meaning they are trained to support multiple channels during the same shift, or even at the same time. A possible scenario is an agent handles a chat session, and next a text message, and next an email – or they could handle all three simultaneously. To prevent agents' heads from spinning, they should be armed with software that includes a unified desktop and inbox. Having everything in one place will help agents provide the best digital customer experience.

Agent performance is just as important as the design of customer-facing software when providing digital customer service. Training agents and providing the right tools and culture will help ensure they can deliver the best digital customer experience possible.