Building A Better Contact Center Agent

National Customer Service Week was set aside by George H. Bush in 1992.  The week has turned into a month-long celebration by many service organizations.   In the Proclamation, President Bush sited the clear value of service excellence in a free market economy.  He said, “A business will do a better job of providing high quality goods and services by listening to its employees and by empowering them with opportunities to make a difference. Customer service professionals work in the front lines where a firm meets its customers; where supply meets demand. With responsive policies and procedures and with simple courtesy, customer service professionals can go a long way toward ensuring customer satisfaction and eliciting the next round of orders and purchases.”

As par of the celebration, I had the opportunity to team-up with ICMI, the nation’s leading global provider of resources for customer management professionals, to write a blog series designed specifically for frontline agents.  We know that great technology and processes only go so far towards the goal to create a “customer obsessed” organization – while the frontline agent really owns the experience.  Their importance cannot be under-valued.

As I developed my outline for the posts, I landed on four key concepts that I think are important.  You can read the posts on the ICMI website:

• Perspective
• Attitude
• Readiness
• Coaching
• The entire list of these posts and more can be found here.

Agents can make or break the customer experience – building great agents is an important part of building successful contact centers.