The TEI ABCs: How TEI gives Agents the tools to navigate tough interactions

Do you know your Tethr Effort Index (TEI) ABCs?

The TEI ABCs

TEI users know that the tool can be used across the entire organization from the (A)gent to the (B)usiness to the (C)ustomer. This is helpful in that companies can look inside each of these areas to see how they can deliver low-effort experiences to their customers. 

Businesses can learn how to attend to those high-effort experiences by letting TEI guide the way. When a difficult TEI score is identified, leaders can let TEI lead them where they need to go to improve the situation. 

According to a recent study by Qualtrics, more than 80 percent of customers who received a high-effort experience wanted a callback so they could supply additional feedback to the business. Customers who were recovered by a closed-loop action were found to be 2x more loyal. 

A is for Agent

Let’s look on the Agent side first. A large Fortune 500 telecommunications company is using TEI to help the agent improve handling of tough customer situations and to upgrade the customer experience. 

Before using Tethr and TEI, the company depended on QA to surface potential problems with a specific call based on a low customer effort score received via their survey platform. While companies have reaped the benefits of efficiency improvements implementing speech analytics, QA failed to get them closer to closing the customer experience gap. QA processes traditionally focus on monitoring what the agent says: proper greeting, script adherence, proper closing and on optimizing efficiency by reducing average handle time. 

In reviewing the call recording, the QA manager of the telecommunications company might conclude that the agent didn’t use advocacy language and that probably resulted in the low Customer Effort Score (CES). In this case, the agent is being coached on the results of one interaction rather than all of the conversations they have had with customers, making it difficult for agents to understand how to incorporate the coaching into their process and use it to improve the experience across all interactions.

How TEI works for Agents

The Tethr Effort Index allows managers to see how many of the agents' calls are difficult as a percentage of 100 percent of the calls they have received, not just the one, and they can compare that ratio across their agent population to get a stronger grasp on which agents are delivering higher or lower effort experiences. 

Within the specific calls, TEI gives leaders a look into which types of language are driving high-effort experiences across that agent’s calls, enabling a substantially better coaching opportunity since the agent now has context on how to improve over time. The TEI score is immediately assigned by the Tethr platform at the completion of each customer interaction so potential churn risks can be immediately addressed and agents can adapt instantly.

Agents win with the TEI ABCs

When it comes to improving how agents handle tough customer situations, TEI is the tool of choice.

Stay tuned for our next post to see how the TEI ABCs work on a (B)usiness angle to impact customer sentiment.