Who is the most important person in your company?  

Is it the Head of Sales, VP of Customer Service, Head of Marketing, or Operations?  

This is a trick question of course, as all roles in an organization are essential to delivering corporate objectives. 

The answer also changes depending on the situation. 

It’s easy to argue that the most crucial person in your organization at any given time is the person answering a customer call. 

More to the point, the front line of customer engagement – your contact center agents responsible for representing the voice of your brand day in and day out.  

What they say and – just as important – the clarity with which they say it sets a tone that can directly impact customer experience. 

If the conversation does not sound natural; if it is muffled or clipped, with words missed or misunderstood; or any of the many other audio irritancies, the customer experience is poor, the impression of your brand is unsatisfactory and repeated engagement is less likely. 

When the experience is good, no one notices; but when it’s lacking, you can see it in customer feedback, social media posts, net promoter scores, and ultimately revenue and market acceptance.  

Including quality, hands-free audio devices or headsets in the last three feet of your communications solution can be mission-critical to a positive customer/agent experience. 

Therefore, the headset that an agent wears deserves significant consideration when building budgets and making technology investments in the voice of your brand.  

“Crystal clear audio is the foundation of a positive interactive experience between any company and its customers,” says Mark Derby, Vice President of Sales at Jabra, a leading global manufacturer of audio and video solutions. 

“The value a business places on deploying quality headsets starts with the agent and ends with the customer. There is a direct correlation between customer experience and the agent experience in the contact center.” 

In 2020 the pandemic-driven mass employee migration from central offices to the home meant businesses often lacked the necessary tools to ensure operational continuity. 

The result was a triage response that quickly moved office communications into employees’ homes, drove businesses to embrace cloud-based platforms, and in some cases included routing calls to employee mobile phones. 

Those who may not have used a headset in the past were now encouraged to use one in the home office. 

This created a supply crunch that lasted many months, with workers often getting ANY audio device available instead of the correct device for the application.  

Of course, the result was a widely different experience business by business, agent by agent, and customer by customer. 

Now, with the post-pandemic reaction to “get back to work” and companies returning to their own new normal, the contact center is one of the first functional departments being addressed.  

Derby explains: 

“While call centers always look to drive efficiency, the need to deliver the most delightful customer experience is coming front and center”

“This is accomplished by providing agents with the right headset for their unique application. For example: 

  • Agents must have best-in-class audio delivered by microphones and speakers engineered for clarity for frustration-free conversation. The result is an increase in agent productivity and a positive customer brand experience.
  • Their headsets require a build quality and durability that can handle the rigors of the enterprise in the short and long-term. Faulty devices take agents out of queue and can impact customer calls negatively
  • A comfort factor designed for all-day agent wear. If their headset is too heavy or puts pressure on their head and neck, it can lead to health and performance issues. Happy agents are more likely to deliver happy customers! 
  • And safety measures that protect agent hearing from sound spikes and long-term exposure that poorly designed and manufactured headsets don’t consider

“Deploying the right devices also delivers a hard dollar returns on the investments made. Jabra has linked ROI deploying best in class devices to improvements in agent (AX) and customer experience (CX) and lower average handling time (AHT). 

“This translates into greater agent productivity, which positively impacts how the brand is represented, and the contact center bottom line, not to mention increased revenues from happier customers. 

“It doesn’t stop in the contact center. The need for the appropriate audio or video devices designed to work with various enterprise applications is more critical now than ever before; as the virtual nature of work grows, how we engage and collaborate changes”

“This isn’t unique to a redistributed contact center with centralized, hybrid, or home-based agents. The traditional task-based knowledge worker who would spend 2-3 hours a day on the phone is now spending 5-6 hours a day or more. 

“What used to look like a contact center agent is now the average worker. The need for the right audio and video device becomes even more important for all the reasons we have discussed.  

“And the growth in the market shows that people are embracing wearable quality audio solutions more and more every day.” 

 

 

 



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