On Thursday, July 16th, the Contact Center Management Association (CCMA) hosted an all-star panel discussion about agent soft skills in the contact center. The virtual event, titled Developing Frontline Skills for Complex Conversations, was sponsored by HiringBranch and featured the following guest speakers:
- Francesca Rea, Director of Operations, NewDay,
- Ingrid Brackley, Head of Customer Service Operations at NHS Property Services,
- Sarah Wise, Operations Director at Fundraising Direct,
- Louise Peers, Head of Contact Centre Services at Crime Stoppers
This talented group spent an hour talking about redefining success for the frontline according to soft skills. Here’s an excerpt from the event webpage:
“Some contact centres enjoy the benefits of many long-tenured frontline colleagues. They know the business, the customers, and the systems, but they will still require support and development to handle changing customer behaviours. For others, they have adapted their recruitment criteria to identify new talent that has a higher emotional intelligence and stronger technical skills to enable them to better adapt to these protracted dialogues. By giving your teams the skills to do their role with confidence, and to give them opportunities to develop their careers by taking on different products, new channels, alternative interaction types, it is possible to better manage your attrition, and therefore your cost base.”
The presenters shared a ton of insights from their personal experience within their diverse organizations. Here are the top takeaways from each speaker.
Key Takeaways for Developing a Skilled Frontline
The evolution of technology in the contact center has meant that handling customer interactions can become more challenging. Similarly, as technology automates service for basic customer queries, agents become necessary to handle more complex customer interactions. These were some of the core themes that came from the panel, and what was most apparent is that the journey for every contact center is unique, often due to the nature of the organization.
Crime Stoppers
Crime Stoppers has a unique contact center with in-house agents receiving anonymous crime reports 24 hours, seven days a week. Soft skills like empathy and compassion are needed for their 100% human agent workforce to do their jobs well.
Any automated or AI adoption is seen as another agent there, that would need human supervision. It takes up to 18 months for one of their agents to be fully trained on the different types of actions needed for crime reporting across public and private sectors, and so they need skilled agents who can handle the complexity of their work.
As contact centers adopt more automated services, Crime Stoppers takes pride in the fact that their human element may one day be a key differentiator. In the future, as new roles are created through the evolution of technology adoption, Crime Stopper says that a different type of agent could be needed.
Fundraising Direct
Fundraising Direct, a darling client of HiringBranch, has an agent workforce dedicated to gathering donations for important charities like Doctors Without Borders, Amnesty International, and Greenpeace. Agents sometimes have different apps and client portals on the go, while talking about money on the phone with another human who isn’t necessarily open to it. So their agents need the right skills to do the job well, while not having too much technology that could be a distraction or interrupt a personal interaction. Agents' skills, like negotiation or rapport building, are essential to handle their complex frontline conversations. To make agents’ lives easier, the organization typically assigns agents to charities that align with their personal passions, allow fully remote work, and give tons of breaks.
Since the topic of fundraising is so personal, automating service using bots isn’t the right solution for Fundraising Direct. That being said, the company has made waves by automating its agent recruitment process using a soft skills assessment.
Fundraising Direct switched from reading CVs manually to reading soft skills in high volumes using HiringBranch AI. Today, because the software is so accurate, they don’t even interview; agents who pass the soft skills assessment are put straight through to training. Sarah said, “Even in an interview, people can impress you with their soft skills, but they can perform very differently on the phone.” With their soft skills assessment, candidates get a preview of the job, and Fundraising Direct has found that those agents who pass are staying with them longer. So even though hiring will always be an ongoing cost in their call center, the assessment is helping to lower organizational costs from reduced attrition. Fundraising Direct also sees a correlation between good soft skills at the time of hire and good management skills, as many agents hired for their skills have graduated into management roles.
NHS Property Services
NHS has a variety of property developments and a skilled agent workforce to help handle customer queries. They’ve gained efficiencies through the use of online, self-service technologies, and that means when people call in, it’s because their query is even more pressing. Agents need the right skills to triage urgent and important conversations. To support these interactions, NHS is starting to develop a knowledge base.
For NHS, their frontline journey has been about making their agents’ lives easier, so they can make their customers’ lives easier. They believe that as conversations on the phone become more complex, agents can become more vulnerable. So they give agents breaks between calls and allow for longer talk time. While handling time can be longer, their first-call resolution is higher.
NHS agents appreciate these types of perks with their small team. Interestingly, their recruitment is almost entirely word-of-mouth from existing employees, and 72% of their promotions are internal, demonstrating their commitment to upskilling and retaining talent.
NewDay
As a financial technology company, NewDay agents need to be enabled to lead rich conversations with lots of data at their fingertips. NewDay has focused on technology adoption to create the best agent setup. NewDay pulled nine different applications together through the use of APIs and asked agents to help them build an internal knowledge base. Then they built a knowledge base agent that helps summarize all the data agents need effortlessly, and the agents were happy to adopt it, having helped build it.
NewDay says to control the information being used by agents and to avoid AI hallucinations, the data feeding the AI is extremely important in contact center tech adoption. Aside from AI, the company relies on finding agents with great customer service skills, like empathy. Since some customer actions may be around topics like payments and debt, agents are trained to give customers the option to self-serve online. As such, the new Digital Coordinator role opened up at NewDay, and the company upskilled and accredited these agents for this type of support. And while their agents are 50% remote, they benefit from free food, drinks, and great activities like beekeeping in the office! That’s a great tip for any contact center hoping to retain their skilled agent workforce.
Learn More About Skilled Frontline Conversations
To get more great resources like the virtual panel discussion presented above, go to the CCMA website by clicking here.
To learn more about developing a skilled frontline, check out the following resources:
- How to Thrive in 2025 with a Skilled Frontline
- Key Frontline Soft Skills Every Contact Centre Needs to Know
Image Credits
Feature Image: Unsplash/Dylan Gillis
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