Call center agents play a central role in the customer experience. And experiences that are favorable tend to benefit the company as well as the consumer. According to a 2023 Zippia survey, customers who experienced positive customer service were likely to later spend 140% more. On the other hand, some 40% of U.S. customers ceased doing business with a company after a single poor experience, the survey found. Such metrics are key to the global call center market, expected to grow to $496 billion by 2027. But what makes a successful call center agent? Here are the essential skills.
The Evolution of Call Centers
Call centers are the workhorses of today’s customer service operations, and it’s the agents who make or break them.
It is a still-growing industry. Despite the availability of self-service and AI tools, for example, 61% of call centers in a McKinsey survey said call volumes rose in the two years after the pandemic began.
Call centers evolved over time. Ever since telephones hit the scene, the devices have been used as marketing tools. The first call center agents were 1950s “housewives” who worked from home, peddling baked goods to bring in extra household cash.
A decade later, the system evolved into more sophisticated training and dialing technology. That was followed by the development of Wide Area Telephone Service, which permitted companies to inexpensively call across the country. Then came the toll-free 800 number, which let customers respond to advertisements for free. This created the first inbound agents for “call centers,” a term that arose in the 1980s, according to Live Agent.
How AI will Transform Contact Centers in the Next 5 Years
Three predictions, for contact center executives to consider, on how AI will shape the future of contact centers
Call Centers and Agent Roles
AI technologies and automation are expected to substantially increase in call centers over the next five to 10 years, according to a 2024 CMS Wire report. Such technological advancements can affect how reps do their jobs.
They also can help with customization, which consumers increasingly demand. For example, some 71% of consumers expect representatives to deliver personalized experiences, according to McKinsey. Moreover, 76% of consumers become frustrated when personalization doesn’t occur. They don’t want to be bounced around when seeking answers, either. Some 83% of customers expect solutions to be solved by just one agent.
Despite the widening use of chatbots and other self-service solutions, consumers still prefer speaking on the telephone for urgent and non-urgent problems, according to First Orion in 2022. The average call center deals with some 4,400 calls monthly.
Whether the agent is inbound (resolving issue) or outbound (sales), agents’ specific roles vary. Their duties may also depend upon the technology the employer uses. Regardless, there is a common goal: to serve the customer. Often, agents are the first and sole point of contact for customers.
Skills Every Call Center Agent Needs
Call center agents have demanding, dynamic, and often complex jobs. These representatives must straddle the line between satisfying callers and meeting organizational needs. Because every call an agent gets is different from the last one, each employee must possess the skills necessary to be able to address the many disparate situations that arise daily. Such skills and qualities include:
Knowledge of offerings and operations.
Agents must have a thorough understanding of the company’s offerings, policies, procedures, and services. This allows them to provide sufficient and efficient support.
Active listening
The ability to listen to customers is key to agents’ ability to provide a more tailored communication experience. Understanding every customer’s needs, concerns, or problems calls for active listening and diligence.
Empathy
The ability to relate to and understand customers’ feelings renders empathy an essential skill for call center agents. According to Hiver, 80% of consumers want more empathetic or responsive customer service, or both. Showing empathy allows agents to better grasp customers’ emotions by viewing their concerns from their perspective.
Problem-solving
Possessing critical thinking skills allows agents to effectively resolve issues. On average, each time a customer has to call back about the same issue, their satisfaction scores decrease by 15%.
Multitasking
Oftentimes, call center agents must juggle multiple tasks at the same time. In addition to handling more than one call simultaneously, they also have to make notes and update customer records, for example. Thus, it helps them to be flexible and organized and possess robust multitasking skills.
Resilience
Every agent will encounter frustrated customers or abusive behavior, making call center positions inherently stressful and potentially emotionally draining. By becoming more resilient, representatives can remain calm and keep a cheerful outlook, even when managing difficult customers or situations.
Top-shelf Communication Skills
Possessing excellent verbal communication skills is necessary for any successful call center agent. Such skills call for friendliness and using positive language with customers and avoiding negative statements.
Accents, Customer Service Agents, and Tomato.ai
Speaking of communication, customers often perceive service reps who speak with an accent that’s different from theirs in a negative light. They commonly base their perceptions of agents’ ethnicity, education level, social class, trustworthiness, and even competency on how they sound. Such discrimination can cause consumers to speak rudely to agents whose accents they deem “foreign”.
Tomato.ai is working to solve this situation through the use of an AI-powered linguistic filter that clarifies in real time the off-shore agents’ voices. With this tool, words pronounced by agents sound more like they do when enunciated by native speakers, resulting in improved intelligibility and less customer frustration.