‘Active Agent is exactly what was missing to focus our staff’ – Adrian Taylor
A high performing workforce is the backbone of any successful agency. But ensuring your employees are working to their full potential is getting increasingly tough.
As the pandemic continues to disrupt the world of work, many agency staff are working from home – in some cases permanently. And that means managing and motivating them is a whole new challenge for agency leaders.
Fortunately, Active Agent is designed with this in mind: not only does it improve Customer Experience, it also improves staff performance. And in this week’s blog, we’re going to look at three simple ways it does that:
1. Connecting task setting with CX goals
It is one thing to ensure employees know what their workflow looks like and are able to follow it; it’s quite another to have that workflow properly prioritised and linked to the overarching goals of your agency.
Especially when working from home, staff are generally expected to determine their own priorities – which certainly has its benefits. But to really maximise performance, the right actions need to be taken at exactly the right moments – and that’s exactly what Active Agent makes happen.
Active Agent creates automatic tasks and assigns them to staff members, so that management doesn’t need to manually delegate or micromanage.
Of course, there are plenty of existing workplace management tools that do this; the difference with Active Agent is the tasks are linked directly to Customer Experience priorities and goals, meaning your staff is directed to the tasks which are most vital to the overall business needs.
Rather than requiring managers to delegate work in real-time based on the needs and wants of customers, Active Agent essentially cuts out the middleman – saving time for both parties and improving Customer Experience immensely.
2. Providing more detailed measurement
The best way of improving employee performance is simple: measuring it properly. Of course, every agency does some measuring – generally using KPIs or crude sales figures as a basis.
But this only really works from a managerial point of view: what you are measuring is useful for managers to evaluate performance, but not for employees to actively improve their performance. The problem, fundamentally, is a lack of detail in the data - you can’t determine what works and what doesn’t.
Active Agent’s reporting and data visualisation gives you exceptionally clear, detailed and easily-digestible data on your customers’ experience and behaviour. By linking this directly to employee actions, you can measure and benchmark how employees are performing, creating strong incentives for them to improve.
Understanding the effect specific actions have on clients and customers’ behaviour can radically empower employees: not only does it allow them to alter their behaviour to improve outcomes, the intricate measurements allow them to visualise and contextualise their actions, giving them a greater sense of responsibility and impact.
3. Removing dull tasks
By automating many of the dullest, most unpopular parts of your employees’ jobs, you empower them to spend their time working on things they enjoy and are better at. Few estate and lettings’ workers love manually typing proposal letters or appointments emails, and by allowing them simply hit send, you’ll improve not just morale but overall productivity.
By even the lowest measures, automation drives around a 15% increase in sales productivity. And the gains in employee morale and engagement will only augment this: a Gallup study shows that highly engaged workplaces saw 41% lower absenteeism – and engagement was directly related to the number of meaningful tasks an employee was doing.
In times like this, the need for strategic insight and top-level thinking are greater than ever, and having a workforce empowered to spend more time tackling these questions – not doing manual tasks – could change everything.
Conclusion | Employee experience is essential
It’s important to consider seriously the impact COVID-19, lockdowns and Brexit might have on the housing market. But it’s also important to remember that your agency is driven by individuals with their own lives, and success isn’t only about managing the political and economic situation – it’s about retaining a great team that can manage it with you.
Employee experience is a major driver for what we do with Active Agent: we know first-hand how difficult managing an agency can be, and we’ve channelled all that experience into a system which truly improves the way an agency runs internally.
If you’d like to see what it could do for yours, book your free demo today.