The Future-Ready Workforce: Elevating Contact Center Success Through Internal Customer Experience

To effectively manage the customer experience in the contact center, we must equally prioritize and explore the internal employee experience with the same vigor as the external customer experience. Research indicates organizations that embrace internal service excellence are competitive disruptors; their employees are innovative, engaged and collaborative.

Creating a future ready workforce requires us to rethink and reframe internal service excellence through a combination of employee feedback and practical training, which will empower employees.

Approach One: Employee Empowerment through Feedback

Gathering and acting on employee feedback is the first step in internal service excellence. I recommend a personalized approach. Conduct 30-minute interviews with your internal customers (employees/agents) to identify their pain points and help them turn them into gain points through training opportunities.

Your focus during the interviews should be focused on usability, productivity and support while obtaining a well-rounded perspective on employees' experience and areas for improvement.

If individual meetings are not feasible, the next best option is to hold small employee listening sessions with two to 10 employees. This will ensure a highly personalized Voice of the Customer experience.

During these interviews, you will find opportunities for on-the-spot microlearning that allow you to exceed your internal customers' expectations. Seize every opportunity, as you can only exceed customer expectations externally if you first surpass them internally.

Here are a few empowering questions you might ask:

1. How easy is it for you to navigate and perform your daily tasks using our system?
2. Are there specific features or workflows that you find challenging?
3. What additional resources or training would help improve your experience?
4. Are there any specific improvements or features that would enhance your workflow or overall satisfaction?

The insights gained will help you close the customer experience gap more effectively and quickly while enhancing employee engagement.

Approach Two: Offer Strategic, Practical and Ongoing Training

Let's explore the benefits of strategic, practical and ongoing training:

• Increased employee engagement: When employees feel heard by their organizations, they feel valued, empowered, supported, and motivated, which reduces frustration.
• Enhances productivity: Agents spend less time troubleshooting the system, allowing them to focus more on providing an excellent customer experience.
• Enhances customer experience: Customers receive quicker, friendlier, personalized service, leading to improved first-contact resolution (FCR) rates.
• Establishes consistent feedback loops: Ongoing training encourages employees at all levels to share feedback, enhancing the diversity of thought.

Practical Training Examples

Establish regular open office hours using your preferred method. This creates a reliable avenue for employees to reach you and can alert you to issues before they impact the organization.

Here are a few options:

• Feedback Session (30-45 minutes): This session is designed to gather valuable input to optimize workflows, enhance system functionality, and improve employee and customer experiences.
• Office Hours (30-45 minutes): This is a one-on-one session to get personalized support. It can be used for new and current employees.
• Quick Support (10-15 minutes): The session will answer your questions, troubleshoot issues or help you navigate the system.

Peer Training

Empower employees who have expertise and are subject matter experts to train their peers. Peer learning is a simple way to transfer knowledge while increasing motivation and job satisfaction.

When my team and I learned that our operational hiring teams would be integrated into Genesys, I organized open training sessions that were accessible to all employees via Microsoft Teams booking. The operational teams met with my team as many times as necessary to receive support and address their initial questions. Simultaneously, I held meetings with the managers as often as needed to guide them through the process.

As a result, we successfully launched on the first day, with all queues meeting their service level targets and the teams demonstrating a clear understanding of system navigation. Now that we have launched, I set up all three open office examples to provide continuous support, the same as I would to an external customer.

The future of contact center success will be driven by differentiation through high-quality internal customer experience through innovative, continuous and practical approaches. While digital transformation is essential as customer-centric leaders, we can't lose sight of what makes the customer experience: the people.