Happy CS Agents Can Enhance Customer Experience and Brand Reach

The findings of new research carried out by LiveOps (News - Alert), Inc., a provider of cloud contact center and customer service solutions, was recently announced by the company. Through this research LiveOps delivers greater insight into customer service experience for companies. For carrying this research, the company collaborated with Harris Interactive (News - Alert) and Social Business Builders.  

 In a statement, Dr. Natalie Petouhoff, CEO, Social Business Builders, said that, "In this unprecedented research, LiveOps went directly to the sources-to the agents, to the consumers and to the brands-to obtain detailed insights that revealed surprises, validations and revelations about the state of customer service today. Social and mobile are rapidly changing the industry. As a result, there is tremendous opportunity and new revenue upside for brands that know how to leverage their contact center agents and multichannel technology platform”.

Highlights of the research data indicate that  a staggering 92 percent of respondents believe an agents perceived "happiness" can effectively enhance their experience with the brand, while 85 percent of respondents said that brand activity and interactions over social media channels and company website indicated its ability to drive customer satisfaction and quality of support.

Petouhoff went on to say, “We found that when agents have a fully integrated social, multichannel desktop, they can not only improve their productivity by 50 percent or more, they can also deliver exceptional social customer service with a high social media ROI. The study revealed that for the companies in our agent productivity and universal queue research, the incremental profit contributions ranged anywhere from $815K to $2M per year. This research proves how much companies can gain by simply empowering agents with the right tools to interact with today's customers."

In the survey, 89 percent of consumers said that communicating with companies via any channel, which also includes social media platforms, without a dip in quality and efficiency of response was very important to brand impression. The research also found that 61 percent of social media users were not happy with the way companies communicate over these channels.

Lastly, the survey found that 90 percent of customers give importance to communication with a live person or agent over any channel as opposed to self service.