Market Research

Finding Answers to Customer Questions The Biggest Hurdle For Contact Center Agents, Study Finds

PRESS RELEASE: eGain, the leading provider of cloud customer engagement solutions announced the findings of an industry-first survey of contact center agents regarding their biggest pain points in providing service when the customer is on the line. The survey revealed that finding the single right answer to customer questions is the biggest barrier to providing good customer service, followed closely by different systems giving different answers.

Having to hop from application to application during the interaction was the third biggest challenge.

Methodology

The survey was administered online to contact center agents in the US, Canada, the UK, Ireland, and the Asia Pacific region in the first calendar quarter of 2017 through SurveyMonkey®. Respondents were asked to pick up to two pain points, and findings were compiled from 465 respondents.

Findings

In identifying the main hurdles to smooth customer service delivery, agents interestingly mirrored the pain points cited by consumers in previous research. According to the survey, this is what agents find difficult:

  • Finding the right answers to customer questions: 26%
  • Different systems/information sources give different answers: 25%
  • Hopping from one application/window to another: 20%
  • Hard to keep up with all the new information/changes I need to know about: 14%
  • Other issues: 15%

Asked about the utility of push-button problem resolution that will invoke contextual knowledge or process guidance in the form of a “Solve” button, an overwhelming 86% of them rated it as a “stress buster” or “it will help me significantly.”

  • Stress buster that will make my life easier: 35%
  • It will help me significantly: 51%
  • None of the above: 14%

Michael Maoz, VP and Distinguished Analyst at Gartner, wrote in the foundational research note, Knowledge Management Will Transform CRM Customer Service, “Improved delivery of contextual knowledge to an employee or customer reduces a provider’s time to answer by 20% to 80%, raising competency and satisfaction. CIOs can reduce customer support costs by 25% or more when a proper knowledge management (KM) discipline is in place.”1

“Next-gen agents don’t like to retain knowledge, and prefer instead to simply ‘look it up’ for answers or get automated guidance,” said Anand Subramaniam, SVP Worldwide Marketing for eGain. “eGain’s recently announced click-to-solve™ feature offers this capability as part of its reimagined agent desktop, called eGain Advisor™.”
More information

Geography-specific breakdown of findings is available at: www.egain.com/contact-center-agent-pain-point-survey-2017.