How to Turn CX Agents Into Revenue Generators
Customer Experience (CX) agents are the backbone of any organization’s customer support operations, playing a crucial role in delivering exceptional customer experiences. However, businesses face several challenges in maintaining their CX operations. These challenges include:
- The increasing per-hour rate for hiring CX agents
- Difficulty scaling revenue while keeping CX processes efficient and effective
- High costs relating to poor agent training, attrition, and retention
What if there’s untapped potential waiting to be unlocked within your CX team? What if your CX agents could be transformed into highly efficient cost-saving and revenue-generating powerhouses?
In this blog, we’ll explore strategies to help your CX agents to help transform your CX team from a cost center into a revenue generator.
Why CX Agents Are Important
Before discussing the strategies for empowering your CX agents, it’s essential to dive a bit deeper into the crucial role they play for your customers. CX agents are the face of your brand shaping customer perceptions and influencing purchasing decisions.
It’s important to note that 80% of customers are likely to abandon a brand after encountering multiple instances of subpar customer service. Therefore, CX agents are critical in fostering positive customer experiences and maintaining brand loyalty.
To contrast this, 77% of customers exhibit greater loyalty to companies that provide exceptional customer support, especially during challenging situations. Despite this critical financial impact, CX agents are still often viewed as cost centers rather than revenue drivers. It’s time to challenge this outdated perception and recognize the potential of empowering your CX agents to drive revenue.
Strategies to Empower Your CX Team to Generate Revenue
Leveraging AI Chatbots for Lead Capture:
AI chatbots can be a valuable tool for businesses looking to reduce overhead costs and enhance the revenue generation capacity of their CX teams.
Chatbots can:
- Manage routine customer queries
- Facilitate lead capture
- Reduce the workload of CX agents
This contributes to overhead cost savings by enabling businesses to operate at a similar efficiency level with fewer agents. Additionally, utilizing AI chatbots can empower CX agents to concentrate on revenue-generating activities such as upselling and cross-selling during customer interactions instead of simple, linear tasks which can be better handled by a bot.
Automating Data Transfer to Sales and Marketing:
Get leads and insights to sales and marketing faster by automating the data transfer process from your CX software to their software.
This exchange not only improves decision-making speed for these departments but also enables more precise campaign execution and informed marketing strategies. The reason? Insights that would normally be kept solely in the possession of your CX agents are now automatically passed along, often in real time, to become revenue opportunities. The outcome of this is stronger sales and marketing results, significantly boosting the efficiency bottom line of your organization.
U.S. Firms that tried to contact potential customers within an hour of receiving a query were nearly 7x as likely to qualify the lead (which we defined as having a meaningful conversation with a key decision maker) as those that tried to contact the customer even an hour later.
Utilizing Data and Analytics:
Unlocking the full potential of your agents data and analytics is crucial for generating revenue. Despite being primarily connected with direct customer interactions, the role of CX agents goes beyond that. With the adept utilization of data, agents can steer more strategic outcomes, which include:
- Generating new product and service concepts to enhance development teams
- Proactively managing “high-volume events” to protect against revenue loss
- Simplifying internal operations and workflows for improved efficiency
By mastering the techniques of harnessing data, CX agents can become pivotal contributors to strategic initiatives, such as product innovation, risk management, and operational excellence. This comprehensive approach serves as a baseline for sustained revenue growth within the business.
Next Steps: Empowering Your CX Agents for Success:
Now that you have a few strategies to turn your CX agents into revenue generators, you may be uncertain about where or how to get started.
Questions like:
- Which AI chatbot should my agents leverage?
- What platforms will allow my agents to remove friction from data transfer to sales and marketing?
- How many other ways can my agents use the analytics at their disposal?
That is why our experts developed a two-week comprehensive AI, Automation, and Analytics (AAA+) workshop.
During this workshop, we dig into your existing systems and workflows and provide tangible optimization recommendations, best practices, and expert advice on how your organization can better leverage AI, Automation, and Analytics to reach your goals.
Join Us at SOCAP for More AI, Automation and Analytics:
You’re invited! Join CX leaders Faye and Zendesk as we sponsor SOCAP’s World Consumer Rights Day celebration. This event will feature a complimentary tour of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, a networking lunch with a live panel discussion from representatives from Campbell’s around their AI, automation, and analytics journey, and a happy hour to follow.
Don’t miss out on this opportunity to meet other local Philadelphia/New Jersey CPG leaders and gain valuable insights into how you can elevate your CX strategy!
Date: March 15, 2024
Time: 11AM start
Location: Independence Hall [520 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA]
