Your Employee Experience Platform is the Core of Your Customer Experience

Supporting Agent and Supervisor with an Employee Experience Platform

An Employee Experience Platform serves to support both employees and managers. For managers, it streamlines work processes, making it easier than ever to complete managerial tasks. The end benefit of this is more high-quality support for employees. Managers can work more efficiently, and as such, dedicate more time to each employee.

Streamlined processes almost always lead to happier employees. If an agent has to struggle through multiple disparate systems to complete even the simplest administrative tasks, they’re going to become frustrated, and eventually, burnt out.

So what are the primary benefits for both managers and employees, and how might an Employee Experience Platform help realize them?

• Managers benefit from streamlined scheduling. In fast-moving workspaces like the contact center, this makes shift planning easier than ever. One click, and it’s done; no more hours spent trawling through spreadsheets.

• Employee Experience Platforms also allow managers to gain in-depth insight into employee performance. With all relevant data brought into a single location, managers to see a complete team overview, or drill down into individual performance, to deliver tailored feedback.

• Often, Employee Experience Platforms will include recording capabilities, giving managers full workplace visibility. In customer-facing workplaces, such as the contact center, the ability to record and analyze every single interaction is invaluable in ensuring quality and meeting compliance standards.

An Employee Experience Platform offers a great deal of flexibility to supervisors, and this has a knock-on effect for agents:

• In-depth performance analytics give allows supervisors to give agents tailored and in-depth feedback. Agents can get a clear picture of what they need to do to develop; no more will they be stuck in career ruts. And a feeling of progression translates to improved Employee Experience.

• An Employee Experience Platform also minimizes the administrative tasks that agents need to do outside of work. Intelligent scheduling that accounts for holidays, combined with shift bidding and AI-powered predictive demand makes it simpler than ever for agents to understand and alter when their next shift will be.

• To grow in their roles, employees need to be constantly learning. An Employee Experience Platform should make comprehensive training resources available, to support employee development.

The Employee Experience Platform brings efficiencies to both sides of the workplace equation; both manager and employee. To deliver these benefits, however, your Employee Experience Platform needs certain essential features.

The Features of an Outstanding Employee Experience Platform

A top-level Employee Experience Platform bundles together a host of different functions into a single, accessible platform. That means, not every Employee Experience Platform will be the same. Different platforms will bring together different functionalities, and as such, have different strengths and weaknesses. The best Employee Experience Platforms will also be Workforce Optimization platforms; that is, they optimize every aspect of an employee’s working day.

• The first key tool is Workforce Management. This brings together predictive demand forecasting with intelligent scheduling, to set schedules for both human and machine agents. This makes staffing easier, saving hours of administrative labor and associated costs.

• Also essential is comprehensive recording. This gives you an overview of every employee’s day-to-day and in particular their interactions with customers. You can survey 100% of customer interactions for compliance, and provide agents with tailored feedback.

• To act on that feedback, agents need a library of training resources. These should be accessible from within a single interface, weaving them seamlessly into ordinary workflows.

• All this should be topped off with contact center-wide reporting. You need the complete picture, whether that’s an overview of all customer contact, or in-depth detail on individual performance.

And this is only scratching the surface of what an Employee Experience Platform can offer. In the AI-powered future, these options are only going to expand.

The AI-Powered Employee Experience Platform

AI is transforming every aspect of life in the contact center. And rightly so; many contact center tasks can be safely and cost-effectively automated. Everything from post-call work to simple customer interactions can be streamlined, and the result is a vastly improved employee experience.

• In the contact center, AI can be used to enhance demand forecasts, painting a more accurate picture of expected workloads. This means more reliable scheduling, more appropriate staffing levels, and an improved employee experience for all involved.

• But AI’s potential goes beyond scheduling. By automating the repetitive and difficult aspects of the agent’s role, you can save them a lot of heartache. In particular, automated transcription and summarization can be deployed to automate post-call, saving time for both agents and customers.

• By deploying automated chatbots, you can take even more pressure off your agents. When the vast majority of incoming customer inquiries are simple requests for information or queries that can be resolved through self-service. Taking these time-consuming tasks off the agent’s plate provides real value for the contact center.

A good Employee Experience Platform will offer broad functionality and touch every aspect of the employee lifecycle, from recruitment to onboarding, through performance and compliance, to training and development. With the AI revolution well underway, an Employee Experience Platform can help your workforce adapt to new tools and AI-powered processes as they are introduced, reducing the impact of changes and enabling rapid adoption.