Just about every customer-facing workplace, from paper sales to restaurants to call centers, has one goal as their holy grail: the best possible customer experience. Improving the customer experience is key to loyalty, growth, and overall business goals. A business that is not concerned with customer experience is one that will soon be out of business.

But less talked about is something equally integral to the success of a business: employee experience. Creating a positive employee experience is key to maintaining continuity, establishing a base of knowledge, and reducing attrition. For jobs that depend on successfully helping a customer with a problem, having a satisfied and motivated base of employees is essential.

Although the employee experience seems less measurable than the customer experience, it is relatively straightforward to understand how to improve it. By deploying human-centered AI coaching, you can give your employees the power and confidence they need to do their best possible work.

Why Improving the Employee Experience is Important

The primary importance of improving the employee experience is that experienced employees improve customer service.

How? Because they are more well-trained, more confident, and more experienced.

Imagine a customer calling into a contact center with an issue they are having with a recently purchased widget. The customer obviously is not an expert in widgets, and they are having a little trouble explaining what the problem is. The thing, they keep saying, is not connected to the other thing. There are a few possible responses from the customer service agent.

1. “I am unfamiliar with that issue, but I will get a manager, maybe she will know.”
2. (Stunned silence)
3. “Oh, you mean the Flux Capacitor. Right, I know exactly how to help you…”

Obviously #1 is preferable to #2, but the best one is #3. The ideal employee is one with the basis of knowledge to answer difficult questions.

Standard training can help them do that. But as any general knows, the best battle plans rarely survive the battle. In real experiences, customers ask strange questions, or don’t know what they are trying to ask.

An experienced employee can use their ongoing training and their experience to navigate the trickiest issues. They will not panic when confronted with something new, and they will have the ability to apply their knowledge to any situation.

So then the key is to make sure that you HAVE experienced employees. That requires reducing the attrition rate so that you have long-term employees who can handle problems and help train newer employees, creating a feedback loop of positivity.

What Leads to a Bad Employee Experience?

There are a lot of factors that can create a negative employee experience, and some of them are out of the hands of the best managers, such as pay, hours, access to good places to grab a taco over lunch. But there are a lot of other factors that lead to a negative experience for a new employee. These can include:

• Feeling unprepared for dealing with real-life customers.
• Not understanding how to make connections between training and customer experiences.
• Lack of support from other employees (who are too busy or too inexperienced to offer guidance).
• Lack of support from managers (who are too busy putting out fires caused by inexperienced employees).

What does this add up to? Stress. Employees who don’t feel prepared to handle challenging situations. Employees who don’t actually help customers because they lack training, confidence, and support.

What happens then? Customers get frustrated. They get more annoyed. Employees get more stressed because every call seems like a potential disaster. CSAT scores go down. Remember, customers might not remember or remark upon positive experiences, but they ALWAYS remember and talk about negative ones.

That’s why improving the employee experience is key to making your customers happy.

The most important part of improving the employee experience is giving workers the support they need to provide the best possible customer experience. When this happens, customers are supported, and their needs are answered.

But the ability to have employees feel confident is a dilemma for customer-facing roles.

The Experience vs. Training Dilemma

In The Matrix, Neo trains a lot in a simulation to figure out how to fight the baddies. There is running and jumping and kung-fu. What there isn’t is a situation where there are four Agents trapping him in a hallway. And of course, there isn’t — you can’t prepare for everything.

And that’s the problem with training. If you have pre-planned situations and scripted experiences, you aren’t going to get weird and unpredictable problems. You aren’t going to have the genuine human element.

The only way to get that element, traditionally, has been to throw new employees out on the floor or to start answering calls. And some employees can handle that. Some thrive there. Most get scared and their confidence wanes with every call, leading to a damaging cycle of attrition – not to mention displeased customers.

So how can you give employees experience in a low-risk environment? AI coaching.

How AI Coaching Improves the Employee Experience

Imagine a system that can mimic the unpredictability of human conversation.

Imagine a system that can draw on millions of interactions and use them to create actual high-impact and prospect scenarios without any risk.

Imagine a system that is essentially a real human experience for the call center employee, but without the fear of getting yelled at by an irate customer.

That’s the Zenarate AI coaching platform. The platform is a perfect mimic of customer calls, giving employees the chance to practice their training, their soft skills, their empathy, and their ability to solve problems. It also provides real-time feedback for managers on where the employee can use more training. And unlike stilted scenarios where a manager reads from cue cards, this feels authentic for the employee.

What’s the upshot? Fewer nerves when they step on the floor. A deeper well of experience from which to draw. More confidence when talking to real people.

All of that makes for a better employee experience. It can help reduce attrition, which leads to more experienced employees being able to guide and train younger colleagues in a way that AI can’t. The platform creates a positive feedback cycle for everyone.

Customer experience and satisfaction is the Holy Grail. Creating better employee experiences is how you find the Grail. AI Coaching from Zenarate gives your people the power to make better experiences for everyone.

Contact our team today to schedule a demo to learn more about how you can incorporate Zenarate AI Coach into your agent training program. We will answer your questions and show you how you can help your organization develop confidently prepared agents while delivering exceptional experiences to the ones that matter most – your customers.