High agent attrition rates are notoriously difficult to reverse. There are usually multiple root causes to the problem, including hiring and training practices, company culture, working conditions, and bad career pathing. But the daily requirements of the job and task fatigue may be a customer service agent's largest source of frustration. And that's where the organization's technology strategy plays a key role. A digital-first approach adds efficiencies that make life easier — for agents and customers.

Here are four ways brands can use AI-powered, digital service platforms to reduce the turnover in their customer service teams.

1. Consolidate to fewer platforms

Service teams field requests, feedback, and complaints on a wide variety of channels — web chat, social media, email, mobile messaging, review hubs, and more. In a traditional system, the agent is switching between windows, screens, or systems to manage those channels. It's exhausting and inefficient. It increases wait times and the chances of an agent losing a customer inquiry in the shuffle between multiple platforms. And even though it's a widely understood challenge, 33% of contact centers still report that their tools "require high levels of agent effort, such as requiring them to look at multiple screens."

Full-featured, digital service platforms eliminate these "screen switching" inefficiencies by consolidating the brand's digital channels into a single agent workspace. Agents can then respond to customers seamlessly from a single dashboard, regardless of the channel where the conversation originated. Give agents fewer tools to master and they'll be less frustrated and more efficient.

2. Reduce stressful interactions

Traditional customer service channels, especially telephone and live, session-based chat, are prone to high-stress interactions. Those synchronous sessions between agent and customer create an immediate conflict between the speed and quality of resolution. Customers want answers immediately, don't want to wait on hold, but also don't want a band-aid solution. Agents are incentivized to close conversations as quickly as possible but are at an impasse when the right answer may require additional research, collaborating with peers, or transferring the customer to another expert — all things that take more time and hurt their numbers.

These time-sensitive interactions can result in customers hanging up, being disconnected or timing out, unnecessary context or background explanations, and all told — frustrating customer and agent experiences. Plus, they don't accommodate customers that want to move at a slower pace or want to come and go at their own convenience, creating frustrating downtime for agents that are on the clock waiting for a response.

Digital care platforms address those issues by relying on asynchronous communication channels. In these real-time or anytime environments, agents don't have to worry about answering questions on the spot, losing their chat history, or sessions timing out, and customers can start, pause, and resume conversations when it's convenient for them. Conversations move at the pace of the customer, not the pace of the brand. And because the interaction is not required to happen in real-time, both customer and agent have the opportunity to set expectations for when you can expect their next reply. It encourages less stressful, more productive conversations that make agents feel less like a cog in the machine.

3. Allow agents to work on more complex tasks

According to a 2017 survey from the Society for Human Resource Management, 56% of employees believe it's very important to their job satisfaction that they have the opportunity to use their skills and abilities at work. Additionally, 43% and 51% cited "meaningfulness of the job" and "the work itself," respectively, as important contributors to job satisfaction.

The traditional customer care role, however, is plagued by repetitive, simple tasks such as communicating account balances, product pricing, business hours, or even taking orders or collecting customer data. Answering the same questions over and over again is rarely meaningful or satisfying. Over time, it can degrade the agent's sense of self-worth and lead to burnout.

Using artificial intelligence (AI) to handle those predictable questions and tasks can dramatically increase the quality of an agent's workday. Customer-facing chatbots, for example, can screen customer inquiries and resolve the simplest of them — from answering routine questions to setting appointments and placing orders. That frees up agents to handle more complex tasks that require human expertise. As an added bonus, AI-enhanced customer care has been shown to reduce resolution times and create higher customer satisfaction, creating a win-win situation for both agents and customers.

4. Empower agents with tools to work smarter, not harder

Even when the agent is handling only the higher-level customer inquiries, parts of the job are still tedious and repetitive. A robust digital care platform should help agents streamline these rote tasks. For example: After addressing and collecting basic information (a customer's order number, issue, contact information, etc.), a chatbot should be able to seamlessly transfer a customer to an agent to complete the conversation and solve their issue. The platform could also leverage agent-facing chatbots that scour the knowledge base for relevant information that may help an agent solve or more accurately respond to a customer issue. CRM integration that displays the customer's full history within the care platform also adds efficiencies and opportunities for customized experiences.

These digital automation features can dramatically improve agent productivity — and a more productive agent is often a more engaged agent.

Consider leading with digital

If optimizing your hiring, training, and coaching practices hasn't resolved your attrition problem, it may be time to change the role itself. Consider a digital-first approach to streamline your agents' workflows, reduce stressful engagements with customers, increase the complexity of the job, and improve agent productivity. You'll likely see happier, more dedicated agents as a result.

Chris Tranquill is the general manager of Khoros Digital Contact Center and CX Insights Solutions, which includes the company's Care, Chatbot, and CX Insights solutions. He's dedicated to helping companies better connect and serve their customers across digital channels with messaging, automation, and powerful CX analytics. He is a SaaS founder and seasoned executive holding over 20 years of experience leading contact center and customer service organizations.

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