Enhancing Employee Experience with AI: a "Bogo" strategy?

Overview

This 4th-in-the-series edition explores how AI can enhance the contact center Employee Experience (EX), specifically for agents, supervisors, and quality managers.  Historically, significant attention has been placed on Customer Experience (CX) metrics; however, the flip side of the coin must acknowledge the impact on the Agent Experience. Indeed, high-performing and engaged Agents have a significant and "BOGO" benefit to the Customer Experience.  How much, and why? Read on...

#AI #ROI #CX #EX #Forrester

To kick this off, we reference a Forrester Consulting study that affirmed what we all might expect but didn't know: how much improvements in EX can benefit CX.

Good employee experience drives bottom-line growth, as happy employees create exceptional customer experiences. And in turn, companies are able to more effectively retain and grow their customers. This fact is further underscored in a Forrester report which notes that a 5% improvement in employee engagement leads to a 3% increase in bottom-line revenue. (“Invest In Employee Experience (EX), Drive Your Bottom Line Growth,” A Forrester Consulting Thought Leadership Paper, October 2020)

Contact Center Experience: A day in the life of an agent...

For anyone who has worked in a contact center as an agent, supervisor, and/or manager, you'll understand and appreciate the daily grind that representatives experience, taking call after call from customers, patients, and members who require assistance, don’t always exhibit the best manners, and frankly, can sometimes be disrespectful and rude.

Assessing the individual and cumulative effect of these calls on agents--and intervening when necessary--is the responsibility of team leads, supervisors, and quality managers.  However, let’s consider the following challenges in getting a full picture of the impact:

1. Since COVID’s transformative effect on shifting agent operations from physical contact centers to work-from-home environments, supervisors no longer have the benefit of “walking the floor” to gauge the pulse of interactions and impact upon their agents.
2. We can all appreciate that agents are also not likely not to report that they’re having tough calls or particularly stressful days. Understandably, they'll be concerned that complaining to their supervisors may be perceived negatively and potentially put them at risk for negative performance assessments, and potentially even be let go.
3. Although supervisors and quality managers audit calls “for quality and training purposes,” pragmatically, the audit rate is extremely small, many times just 3 calls per month, or perhaps several per week to obtain added perspective. 

Implementing Emotion and Conversation AI for EX: a solution overview

The growing importance of AI in the contact center industry has the opportunity to improve agent experience, efficiency, and effectiveness. Specifically, Emotion AI solutions such as offered by companies such as Cogito, Cresta, and Observe.ai assess and provide either real-time and/or post-call guidance in the areas of speaking behavior, including attributes of the agent's pace, energy, and empathy. Improving these behaviors has been shown to beneficially impact KPIs such as Call Quality, Efficiency (Average Handle Time), and Sales.   

In a complementary fashion, Conversational AI solutions offer contextual guidance, providing quick access to reference materials, training, and knowledge-base articles.  According to the recent market analysis report, Forrester Wave™: Conversation Intelligence For Customer Service, Q3 2023, the following vendors are noted as leading in this market sector:

• CallMiner, Cresta, Qualtrics, ASAPP, Verint, NICE, Gridspace, Cogito, Invoca, Medallia, and AWS.  (The reader is directed to the Forrester report for additional vendor information.)

The EX Impact and BOGO Value … a chain of benefits

Here's where the BOGO (buy-one-get-one) benefit begins to materialize. These listed AI solutions have a direct bearing beyond the first-order Agent and Customer Experience metrics.  Agents who perform better, feel better about their job, and with this boost in morale, they are more likely to stay with the company.  Following the value chain, in so doing, valuable secondary benefits emerge; for example, satisfied agents recommend to friends and family to consider working there too, helping with recruiting.    Furthermore, with an increase in average tenure, business performance metrics improve--there’s the real value. In turn, supervisors and HR managers are able to more effectively coach, and agents are more receptive to that coaching given that a larger, more representative call sample size is used, creating a more positive feedback loop. 

Ultimately, improved agent retention reduces the cost of attrition, which is manifested in a lower cost of recruiting, onboarding, and training. Enterprises typically report the cost of hiring and training a new agent to be in the range of $10,000 to $14,000.    Beyond cost of hiring though, the bigger benefit of improved retention relates to the opportunity cost associated with lower performance of a new agent vis-a-vis more tenured agents: longer call times with lower CSAT and call resolution is where the real cost lies!

The combination of Emotion AI, Conversation AI, and Generative AI can reduce or eliminate tedious tasks, accelerate time-to-proficiency, and independently alert supervisors, all helping to reduce agent burnout and resulting attrition. In this way, AI has transformative potential for improving employee experience.  AI's ability to provide real-time guidance and assistance makes agents more confident and effective, spilling over to enhancing the customer experience. 

The Irony…Human-AI Collaboration

• Keep in mind that for these use cases for contact center agents, AI acts like a real-time or post-call coach, improving the agent performance; it's not a replacement for contact center agents. 
• Ironically, AI helps agents act more human, with more natural speaking behavior, better and faster access to desired information, and QA coaching based not on a few call samples each month, but on a much larger audit of calls, if not all calls.
• With real-time Emotion AI and Conversational AI, supplemented by Generative AI, the solution can provide valuable call summaries, with related insights and recommendations to agents, allowing them to self-assess and have more productive coaching sessions with their supervisors. 

Some Practical Tips: Agent Feedback, Enablement, and Engagement

• Operations and HR managers should introduce AI solutions in a contact center, by first conducting discovery sessions with agents and supervisors, assessing needs and where current solutions and processes are falling short. 
• Involving supervisors in AI implementation decisions can foster a positive work environment, and help them recognize these types of solutions will help agents achieve better performance, hit target KPIs more quickly, and even qualify for step increases in pay and position.
• As with any new contact center solution, it’s important to collect ongoing feedback from front-line employees about tools used in their daily work, especially AI solutions.  
• Just as with the Formula 1 team example we used in the prior article, recognizing it's not just about the engine (racecar or in this case, AI), the need for team training and support is essential for effectively implementing AI solutions. 

• More on these points about solution discovery and team enablement coming in a future newsletter article.

Conclusion

By investing in improving the employee experience via real-time and post-call coaching, implementing AI solutions leads to happier, more productive agents who in turn will more confidently interact with callers and improve the customer experience.  Once an AI solution has been deployed for use by agents, continue to capture metrics around employee satisfaction and engagement. Leverage the data resulting from the AI solution to assess the impact to KPIs and ROI, but also be sure to conduct live and/or written feedback workshops—again affirming the objective of helping agents during the course of their seemingly endless days. 

Your agents...and your customers...will thank you!

Feedback and comments are welcomed… 

• What type of AI solutions have you seen deployed in contact centers?  
• What KPIs are typically impacted?   
• What AI metrics would be good to incorporate into quality scorecards?