5 powerful agent productivity hacks

Jason ordered a new phone a week ago, and there’s no sign of it. So, he tries calling customer service and is greeted by the all too familiar (but, nonetheless, frustrating) ‘Hello valued customer, all our agents are busy right now, please wait on hold; you are 7th in line’. 

Is it the agents’ fault? No, those poor folks are busy answering the same questions over and over again to multiple customers. They’re just as frustrated as Jason is. 

So, how do you make your agents’ lives easier, while increasing their productivity? It’s not as hard a task as you think. Sometimes, all it takes is 5 simple steps. 

Here’s how to increase agent productivity: 

1. Automate the repetitive conversations 

2. Give them context 

3. Use a one-view inbox 

4. Integrate your CRM and ticketing system with your chat system 

5. Monitor them in real-time 

(Ps. Keep reading, we've got a great bonus tip for you)

Automate the repetitive conversations 

About 80% of the customer queries you receive and repetitive in nature. How do you plan on boosting agent productivity if you have them sitting around, answering the same questions, over and over again like broken records? 

You need to automate these repetitive, monotonous questions. You don’t need to waste human energy answering them. 

Prioritize your agents' time. Assign them only to complicated questions. Let the machine handle the simple ones so that your agents actually have the time to answer the tougher ones. 

Give them context 

Do you seriously want your agents to waste their time asking customers questions that they’ve already answered in previous conversations? 

Maybe they’ve already had a conversation with your bot, who transferred them to the agent. Now if they have to repeat themselves, it's going to frustrate your customers and waste your agents’ time. Sounds like a lose-lose situation. 

Now, if you just provide your agents with the recent conversations that the customer has had with your bot or any of your agents in the past, the agent currently serving them could have context and solve their problems without asking them to repeat themselves. See, you’ve turned that into a big win there. 

Use a one-view inbox 

You definitely need to be engaging your customers on multiple channels. But that’s no excuse for confusing your agents (and, in turn, your customers). 

What you need to do, is adopt a one-view inbox. Give your agents access to all the conversations with the customer, across all the channels, in one place. 

Here’s where context plays in once again. When your agents can refer to conversations across channels, the scope for confusion will be minimized and the customers won’t have to repeat themselves. 

Integrate your CRM and ticketing system with your chat system 

By integrating your chat system, your CRM, and ticketing system together, you’re going to be able to save your agent’s time, while understanding your customers better. 

This will even help you build superior buyer personas and generate leads with greater ease. 

And, it will help you improve your agent productivity doing away with the need to continuously hop across multiple systems and screens. It will all be in one place and the process will be seamless. 

Monitor them in real-time 

You need to keep an eye on your agents. You need to be watching them in real-time. 

Look through the dashboards. Get insights on your agent’s performance. Observe your agents and see which ones are the best performers. Now, reward them and the others will be motivated. 

Your supervisors even need to be able to take over sensitive conversations from agents and handle them in real-time, without any delays. 

Bonus tip: Skill-based conversation routing 

Route conversations intelligently to agents, depending on their skills and expertise. Don’t waste your customers’ or agents’ time manually routing the conversations across departments. 

Get one solution that does it all 

You need a chat system that gives you all these benefits. One that’s the perfect blend of automation and live chat. 

You need a system that gives your agents context about the conversations, across all the channels they take place on. That allows you to integrate it with your CRM and ticketing systems, monitor your agents’ performance in real-time and route conversations intelligently. 

Engati Live Chat does exactly that for you, giving you everything you need to substantially enhance agent productivity. 

Try it for free today!