The 3 Es – How To Drive Agent Performance, Improve the Support Experience

Organizational leadership can say all the right things regarding customer-centricity. Human resources can do a tremendous job of recruiting intelligent, personable, motivated agents to handle help desk inquiries.

Without successfully fusing the practices together, its philosophically admirable initiatives will provide little tangible reward. They will do little to elevate the business from one hindered by shortcomings to one empowered by strength.

Whether approached from the external perspective of the customer or the internal perspective of the employee, ideas are meaningless. Actions are everything, and if an idea is incapable of making the transformation to action, it might as well have never been conceived.

Neither able to openly demean customers nor employees, technical support leaders have no choice but to emphasize a theoretical commitment to the notions of customer- and employee-centricity.

Rarely able to garner unlimited budgetary and philosophical support from their stakeholders, technical support leaders often find themselves required to make tough choices about how best to actualize some of their ideas. And insofar as they tend to make those choices from positions of reluctance and inertia, they rarely do what is required to drive meaningful change—and meaningful results.

With customer experience now functioning as a significant competitive differentiator and employee experience functioning as a significant driver of customer experience, that bottlenecking is not tolerable. The choices leaders make need to put weight behind their customer-centric and employee-centric words.

Luckily, such choices are not as difficult as cynics would suggest.

Pitney Bowes’ Jesse Hoobler, who will be speaking at the Technical Support and Help Desk Summit, reveals that adherence to "3 Es" will position businesses to actually deliver on their philosophical support experience promises.

The 3 Es do not permanently remove challenge, hardship and cost from the equation, but they absolutely do put businesses in position to overcome those inhibitions before ultimately driving the value tech support and contact center believers long knew their departments could.

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Engage

Engagement is so fundamental to driving employee performance that many refer to agent experience strategies as "agent engagement" ones.

An obvious necessity, the concept nonetheless finds a way to consistently confound businesses.

For employees to successfully function in a technical support environment, they must simultaneously develop a comprehensive understanding of their position within the business’ core objectives and enough agility to move seamlessly between the issues and individuals they will support.

Open communication might serve as an appropriate linguistic definition of engagement, but it does not bring a business closer to the aforementioned goals. Generic communication about corporate values and generic training and scripting are not the answers for creating a more customer-centric workforce.

True engagement involves understanding an agent’s unique strengths and perspectives and then painting an accommodating portrait of the technical support environment. Agents must be informed "what to do," how to do it" and "how what they do creates value to clients and shareholders" in terms of personalized relevance.

Instead of normalizing all agents, coaching should involve unlocking the unique qualities an agent can corporate into the support mix. When that happens, an agent will not only have a personal understanding of where he fits into the support process but personal confidence in his unique ability to drive value. Those signify a truly engaged agent.

Rewards tied directly to customer-centric and business-centric outcomes, rather than arbitrary, intermediary measures, also boost engagement. When an agent senses an alignment between what the organization wants him to do and what it needs him to do, he functions most effectively.

Empower

If a customer (internal or external) satisfaction truly matters to a business, the business will make every reasonable effort to win the customer’s support. It will not allow minor gripes over fees, shipping charges or return policies get in the way of a favorable long-term relationship.

Given that unmistakable reality, an organization gains nothing by applying a chain of command to the support process. If it is going to rectify minor problems no matter what, it gains far more by entrusting the agent to handle the issue—thus minimizing support time, improving first call resolution and boosting engagement engagement—than it does forcing the agent to pass the customer’s inquiry to a supervisor.

To succeed, businesses must engage agents. To engage agents, businesses must establish clarity about the purpose of the technical support function and the agent’s role in driving value.

Once a business successfully communicates that value to its agents, it has every reason to trust the agent to operate in accordance with that value. Its agents know their business’ objectives when dealing with customers. They, therefore, know how best to respond to customer inquiries.

Empower them to do so.

Not simply a customer-facing philosophy, empowerment also concerns an agent’s role within the organization. Often forced to adhere to a hierarchy, agents feel powerless to call meetings, summon support from fellow agents and managers and introduce ideas about new strategies and practices. The result is a weaker, less collaborative, less productive technical support atmosphere.

If an agent means it when it says the employee experience matters, it will give them the power to draw upon the organization’s tools in completing their duties. It will then give them the power to use their own logic and senses of customer-centricity and organizational value when interacting with customers.

Enable

Businesses that believe they can rid their support experience of flaws by purchasing and installing new technology are horribly misguided.

Businesses that believe they can optimize their support experiences without assistance from technology are equally misguided.

Technology is no substitute for effective strategies and practices, but it does serve to enable both. If agents lack access to the data they need to understand support issues, the platforms they need to communicate their responses and the perspective they need to monitor the outcome, they have no prayer of performing optimally.

Just as a successful business philosophically empowers its agents to act in the best interest of customers and clients, it must also provide a technical form of empowerment. It must give them access to the desktop views, customer insights, knowledge bases and intra-office communication tools they need to astutely, efficiently and successfully resolve matters. Only then will their investment into agent engagement and empowerment provide the desired return: a reduction of customer issues, greater satisfaction and a more fruitful corporate operation.

Associated with agent engagement, training also factors into the enablement process. In addition to tailoring coaching to employees’ unique skills, businesses must also transform the overall objective of training. Instead of simply focusing on how to use the systems and successfully interact with customers, training must focus on how to optimize value.

In a tech support environment, that will enable agents to go beyond responding to issues and start focusing on teaching customers how to maximize the value they get from a given product. A sign of the business’ commitment to the customer, the proactive approach to support will transform its identity from one that can fix things when things go wrong to one that goes above and beyond to make sure things always go right.