Phrases and headlines such as “the customer engagement revolution”, “making customer engagement effortless”, “improving customer engagement” and “investing in customer engagement” abound in traditional media and social media, says Ebrahim Dinat, COO at Ocular Technologies.
According to recent research by Aberdeen, the pursuit of the delighted customer has surpassed the need for better agent productivity as the most important goal for contact centre workforce optimisation systems.
However, Mike Bourke, senior vice-president and GM Workforce Optimisation at Aspect, an Ocular Technologies partner, poses the question, “ If agent productivity is less important, what should the focus on agent behaviour be to ensure customer delight? Knowledge of human nature would tell us that the agent’s level of happiness and job engagement would be an important contributor to customer engagement, but we don’t hear much about the agent’s role.”
Bourke recounts a study by Forrester in 2011 that showed that almost all executives surveyed were convinced that customer satisfaction and agent experience are very highly correlated. Further, they thought that improving the agent experience was among the top three factors likely to improve the customer experience. The agent is clearly not getting enough recognition in the marketplace when it comes to factors that help to please the customer.
“In a conversation between two human beings, you really can’t separate their experiences. They influence each other significantly, continuously and symbiotically. If the agent is really enthusiastic and positive, it has to affect the customer in a positive way. If the customer is angry, it will be perceived by the agent, and sometimes the agent gets angry as well,” he says.
Looking at it from this point of view means that “agent engagement” should carry a lot more weight than what is generally perceived and the focus of discourse today. Workforce optimisation (WFO) software should thus embrace both customer and agent engagement.
Taking a leap forward, Aspect has developed and “engagement quotient (EQ)” measurement model to drive that engagement quotient for customers and agents.
“Knowing that both customer engagement and agent engagement are important to ultimate customer satisfaction and that you really can’t look at them separately, we need a measure to capture the level of engagement of both the agent and the customer. This gives you an objective view of how well your contact centre is succeeding with a comprehensive measure of engagement,” says Bourke.
As such, Aspect has refined its WFO portfolio and renamed its WFO offering to “Aspect EQ Workforce Optimisation” to embrace the contribution that WFO can make to customer and agent engagement. In March this year, Aspect released the 8.1 version of its Aspect EQ WFO software with many new features, and Ocular Technologies has made this software available to its southern African customers.
Bourke states, “most think about WFO as a way to enforce contact centre rules and practices rather than as driver of customer and agent engagement.”