How to Connect Employee Experience to Business Growth

With an average 40% turnover rate, the contact center can be a turbulent work environment. However, agents who feel satisfied in their role directly drive business growth. They are 17% more productive, increasing sales opportunities and reducing operational expenses. They’re 65% less likely to leave, saving tens of thousands of dollars monthly on hiring costs. They’re also 16x more likely to recommend their employer, which explains why companies with highly engaged employees are 21% more profitable than those without.

Only 30% of contact center agents are highly engaged and 63% are at risk of burning out. How can your contact center organization effectively leverage employee experience (EX) as a key growth engine to achieve greater customer satisfaction, revenue, and measurable results? Here’s how to close this critical gap.

Step 1: Understand Your Current Agent Experience

Assessing your current agent experience is crucial for understanding the strengths and weaknesses of your work environment and establishing a baseline. Here are some ideas to consider:

• Design surveys: Create anonymous surveys that include both quantitative (e.g., rating scales) and qualitative (e.g., open-ended questions) elements. Focus on aspects like job satisfaction, workload, communication, training, and support.
• Interview selected agents: Hold one-on-one or small group interviews to gain deeper insights. This can help uncover issues that surveys might not fully capture.
• Use focus groups: Organize focus groups to discuss themes emerging from surveys and interviews. This promotes open discussion and allows agents to share experiences and solutions collectively.

The benefits of this step are clear. Consider Aflac, for example. The insurance company, a long-time Avaya customer, developed an employee advisory council consisting of frontline production staff that meets quarterly with contact center leaders. This forum allows for new ideas to be shared, particularly about enhancing the agent experience, and promotes open discussions. This played a key role in helping the company reduce agent attrition by 20% and increase its number of tenured agents by 10%, improving average handle time and customer ACE scores in the process.

Step 2: Define Your Employee (Agent) Experience Goals

Employee experience goals differ by company, but key themes consistently emerge as drivers of revenue growth.

• Agent engagement: Engaged employees are significantly more productive, generating an average of $9,000 more per year.
• Communication and collaboration: Teams that collaborate are 50% more productive than employees who work alone.
• Work-life balance: Most employees prioritize work-life balance over salary or benefits, making it a critical factor for retention. This is especially relevant for contact center organizations, where 60% of agents say they're very likely to leave their jobs in the next six months.
• Overall job satisfaction: Great service turns customers into repeat spenders. Agents play a crucial role in ensuring this happens.
• Agent empowerment: Agents who feel confident in their roles are proven to be more effective at responding to customers and resolving issues, which 83% of customers say increases their loyalty and spending.

Step 3: Align EX Goals to Business Growth Objectives

After assessing your current agent experience and defining your employee experience goals, you must align these goals with your business growth objectives. Here are several examples:

• Increase revenue: Use powerful AI tools like AI agent assist, translation and transcription, and automated wrap up to enhance real-time performance. This approach reduces customer hold times and creates more opportunities for agents to build loyalty and drive sales.
• Expand geographically: Support high-performing teams from anywhere with remote agent capabilities, which also help lower infrastructure costs.
• Increase agent engagement: Offer personalized training options, including gamification, to address specific skill gaps – something 61% of employees consider important.
• Strengthen customer engagement: Provide agents with contextual knowledge documents during customer interactions that drive personalization while improving first contact resolution (FCR).
• Increase customer retention: Empower your agents to be proactive with context-driven predictive data and a comprehensive customer view. This enables them to anticipate customer needs, including potential sales opportunities. At the same time, make it easy for agents to tap subject matter experts across the organization to help solve problems faster and more effectively. Remember: customer experience isn’t contained to just the contact center.
• Enhance agent efficiency: Modernize with a unified desktop that provides agents with comprehensive customer information across all touchpoints in one view, eliminating the hassle of switching between screens.

Connecting EX to business growth (BG) is not just a strategic advantage—it’s a necessity

Avaya empowers organizations with an industry-leading EX solution that helps navigate complexities, bridge capability gaps, and foster innovation without disruption. Here are five reasons why our solution stands above the rest:

1.  The smartest AI-powered platform empowers agents with everything from AI noise cancellation to real-time insights and suggestions that help them respond more effectively to inquiries and resolve issues faster.

2.  An open platform enables agents to connect with subject matter experts easily, ensuring they have the support they need to resolve customer issues quickly.

3.  Remote agent capabilities offer flexible work options that promote a better work-life balance and adapt to agents’ needs.

4.  Individualized training initiatives, including gamified learning experiences, target specific skill gaps – helping agents truly grow and develop.

5.  Context-driven predictive analytics provide a 360-degree view of the customer, enabling agents to anticipate needs and enhance the overall customer experience.

Empower your agents and turn your contact center into a revenue generator, leveraging existing strengths to fuel future growth.