How AI Can Reduce Stress for Retail Contact Center Agents

The end-of-year holiday season brings an extra layer of stress to the retail industry contact center agent’s work, and even if that stress diminishes after Christmas Day, the reprieve is short. Christmas quickly becomes New Year’s, then Valentine’s Day, Easter, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, and so on. In our consumer-driven culture, the “holiday sale” never truly ends.

For each occasion, pre-holiday pressure over sales terms and product availability shifts literally overnight into post-holiday pressure over returns and delivery delays. Even in slower times, agents are underequipped to satisfy every demand; with added urgency from constantly rotating holiday deadlines, it’s even harder to avoid agent burnout.

Consumers have benefitted enormously from the e-commerce revolution. Purchasing and sending gifts is faster and easier than ever. However, when it comes to the customer service teams that back these operations, many aren’t equipped with the latest tech solutions or people-management strategy to effectively serve these teams. Let’s explore how each can be deployed to the agent's and business’s benefit.

Identify the Source of Stress

Taking back-to-back calls and responding to complaints and dissatisfaction takes a toll on even the most cool-headed agents. Back in my call center days, my colleagues and I loved the simple “breather” calls about store hours and billing due dates, which allowed us to catch our breath while still on the clock. Now those questions go to self-service chatbots, leaving agents with only high-stakes calls that are often fraught with complexity or emotion, or both.

With their time and performance closely calibrated, spotty breaks, and repetitive manual tasks during and between calls, it’s hard for agents to consistently muster the human touch necessary to help customers through their moments of truth, when they need answers about missing shipments, financial disputes, and other complicated issues.

These are hard challenges, but new developments are making them easier to solve. Retailers are leveraging people-friendly tactics to reduce stress and help contact center agents stay focused and engaged. And artificial intelligence-powered technology will finally allow agents to deliver the customer service revolution we’ve all been waiting for.

Deploy People-Friendly Tactics

Call center managers should understand the importance of keeping their agents happy. After all, their people are the core of the business. But in order to activate the most effective people-management strategies, they must be proactive, communicate often, and reinforce business decisions.

Be Proactive

Retailers know when busy seasons happen, so they should prepare agents in advance. That means training and updates on deals, policies and other issues likely to provoke consumer questions. Early in my career, I worked for a brand that released a new product at Christmas time but delayed product training for agents until a few days before the release. When the product hit the market, many agents still hadn’t completed their training; their inability to answer questions frustrated customers and undercut the success of the release. That could have been prevented with a little foresight.

Communicate Intentions

Retailers should always define what they hope to achieve and communicate that transparently. For instance, leaders working to incorporate AI into their operations should state clearly what they expect from the technology and from the people who will use it. Will AI complement employees? How? Will it replace some roles? Which ones? Big questions left unanswered will often be misinterpreted.

Align and Reinforce

Once a policy has been decided, it’s critical to get the entire leadership team aligned around it. Employees communicate best with their direct supervisors, so if a team leader says something contrary to the stated policy, mistrust and fear can quickly take root and spread. Explain plans consistently and repeatedly, and follow through on their execution. Employees will mostly believe plans they hear about, but they’ll really believe plans they see put into practice. If you do this consistently, good faith across the company will soon run on its own momentum.

Leverage AI and Prevent Agent Attrition

AI-powered technology is still generating retail growth and development, with new capabilities to genuinely improve operational efficiency and ease pressure on agents. AI can automatically monitor and aggregate data from multiple contact center technology systems. It can identify brief intervals across operations in real time and leverage them to send training directly to agents’ desktops. It can alert agents back to service just as quickly when customer demand surges, bookmarking training progress for later.

AI can prevent the accumulation of stress by leveraging intervals to automatically offer on-the-spot breaks to hard-working agents. It can also relieve supervisors by automating updates to training and break schedules, which are constantly disrupted by fluctuating demand.

In these ways, AI is helping service centers recover precious untapped capacity and clearing the path for human skills to move back to the forefront of customer service, where they belong. Customers will connect with agents who are more tuned in and ready to solve their problems, and agents will benefit from supervisors who have more time to hear them and support them.

AI’s unique predictive capacity also offers contact centers a long-overdue solution to chronic attrition. The technology can aggregate historical data from agents who quit and use it as a benchmark against data from current employees. AI can flag agents who approach critical burnout thresholds that had been crossed by departed agents shortly before they quit, giving supervisors advanced warnings to engage more directly with at-risk agents. Replacing a departed agent can cost as much as $30,000, and time-to-proficiency for a new agent may take a full year. That’s a significant investment, and well worth protecting.

Embrace the Return of the Human Touch

It’s a mistake to think of technology primarily as an alternative to or substitute for human workers. First-generation chatbots are a case in point; they’re able to satisfy only the most basic requests and often frustrate customers by adding an extra step before an eventual call to a live agent.

Today’s emerging AI technology is different. AI is creating space for a reemergence of the human touch through its ability to automate repetitive administrative tasks, anticipate needs and solutions, and seize opportunities that arise and disappear in an instant. These functions have always been at the core of customer service, but in recent years have been pushed aside by complexity and false paths to efficiency and profitability.

Customers will always need to connect with human agents, and agents will always need to connect with human supervisors. If we use it wisely, AI will make both those necessities easier to achieve.

Jennifer Lee is the president and COO at Intradiem, a provider of contact and call center automation solutions.