The 3 pillars of agent happiness – Interview with Tue Søttrup of Dixa

Today’s interview is with Tue Søttrup, Chief CX Evangelist & VP CX Excellence at Dixa, a customer service platform that generates value for brands and customers through better conversations. Tue joins me today to talk about some recent research that Dixa recently released, what we can learn from it, knowledge centred service and agent happiness.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – In three years gig experts will be able to do everything agents can do in the contact centre – Interview with Roger Beadle of Limitless – and is number 421 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Here are the highlights of my chat with Tue:

• I spoke to Mads Fosselius, CEO of Dixa,  on the podcast two years ago.
• Dixa recently released a new research report called Reconnecting The Customer Experience: Three Ways To Catapult Your Customer Service In 2022.
• The main headline is that there’s a lot of work to do if we are to improve both the customer and the agent experience.
• Headline findings:
  • 74% of agents feel that they are missing important customer information and context to provide a better service.
  • 60% of agents feel it’s very important that they’re truly helping customers.
  • 42% of customers say that they need to repeat information almost every time to resolve one inquiry.
  • 80% of customers are likely to spend more money with a company after a positive customer experience.
• Only 25% of agents report that inquiries are served to them automatically. But, the study found that when inquiries are routed automatically, then 68% of agents report achieving a CSAT of five.
• The level of automatic routing in place is low due to current systems not supporting that type of approach and also because managers are not prioritising it.
• When agents were asked how they find answers to customer questions, 70% said their their answers are located in other apps so they have to go looking for the answers, shockingly 29% said that they googled it and 27% said they had to ask other agents.
• 59% of agents reported that they lack the knowledge to provide better service.
• Brands often don’t have a process for how to work with knowledge.
• At Dixa we work with KCS or knowledge centred service, which is a methodology where you make documentation of how to solve a problem part of the problem solving process. That means that when you get a question from a customer and you use a support article to solve the problem. If that article has incorrect information, you either update it or flag it so it can be corrected. If no support article exists then it is your responsibility as an agent to add that draft article.
• Tue recently wrote an article called How to Reduce Agent Churn Using the 3 Pillars of Agent Happiness.
  • The 3 Pillars
    • The first pillar is for the agents to know what the customer is contacting you about and also what that customer has contacted you about before on other channels.
    • The second pillar is knowing who the customer is and providing the agent with information on how much they have spent in the past, their last order, order status or other information that can help the agent.
    • The third pillar is knowing how to solve the customer’s issue, and this is where knowledge and the KCS methodology comes in.
• When you have these three pillars in place, the what the who and the how, then agents don’t need to go to multiple systems or different tabs to find information or solutions. They can actually focus on providing great customer experiences.
• This is all about removing friction not only for the agents but also for customers.
• The future of service and experience will see brands moving away from seeing customer service as a cost centre and instead see them viewing it as a value centre.
• We are seeing a general focus that is shifting away from looking at annual recurring revenue to net revenue retention because for many brands it is cheaper to retain a customer than to acquire a new customer since the pandemic. It’s so easy for customers to move from one brand to another, and customer acquisition cost is really, really high.
• One of the key challenges lying ahead is going to be balancing the customers’ desire for self service with a seamless handover to a human agent.
• Tue’s best advice:
  • 1. Talk to your front line agents. They know what customers are saying and what challenges they have. A part of that is also to look at the data about why your customers are getting in touch with you. Use that information to make changes to your product, to newsletters, to shipping notifications, to your website or processes, and continue to measure this so you ensure that the change that is made has the desired effect.
  • 2. Focus on metrics that measure the customers’ experience with a brand and not performance metrics. Metrics that measure the customer experience are CSAT, NPS, First contact resolution and total time to resolution. Brands that make it effortless for customers will continue to be winners regardless of what vertical they are in.
• Tue’s Punk CX word: Dare to be different.
• Tue’s Punk XL brand: Too Good To Go

About Tue

Tue Søttrup is currently Chief CX Evangelist & VP CX Excellence at Dixa where he’s carefully nurturing a small bonsai tree called GenZen.

With over 20 years of experience in customer service, Tue is driven by his passion for the industry. Customer experience and engagement is an integral part of any business, and Tue truly believes that software can empower brands to build stronger and longer lasting relationships, as well as dramatically improve the agent experience.

Check out Dixa, say Hi to them and Tue on Twitter @DixaApp and @tuesottrup and feel free to connect with Tue on LinkedIn here.

Image credit Angelique Downing on Wunderstock (license)