Sharpen Technologies believes better contact center and ultimately corporate performance depends on contact center agents. Their unique call center solution is microservices and cloud-based. They have 70 employees, 250 global customers and are strong players in retail, ecommerce, tech and financial services.
Sharpen pricing ranges from $5-$109 per agent.
The company recently had 160% contact center seat growth, and nearly doubled its customer count. WeWork is one of its most notable customers.
In an exclusive interview with Murph Krajewski, VP of Marketing and Adam Settle, VP of SharpenU, we discussed the company’s recent $15 million in funding and their new hires which have resulted in over 125 years of industry leadership.
When we interviewed them last year we wrote:
Sharpen believes it is a great solution for solving customer satisfaction and agent turnover issues – two of the biggest problems plaguing contact center execs.
Since that time, they were working on an agent experience score (AXS) which measures things like effectiveness and average handle time. According to Murph, it is now availablev.
Murph said, “We need ninety days of data to aggregate this score.” He continued, “This solves the customer experience being tied to agent experience issue. A struggling agent can’t help customers effectively.”
The company holistically measures agent experience. Supervisors can keep track of agents and determine if they are working quickly, accurately, feeling supported, etc.
Murph said, “This allows supervisors to see where weak links are and help with training as needed.” He added, “CX is a symptom, not a problem – it is an indicator.”
The company believes you need happy and engaged agents to have better customer satisfaction and AXS is their attempt to measure this. They liken it to a temperature gauge.
“You can also compare contact centers against each other. You can see improvement and compare to anonymous competitors,” explained Murph.
Murph went onto explain that CX is like a headache. When you get one, you can’t be sure what the cause is. In other words, it is a symptom and you need to track down the underlying issue.
But in the case of CX, the problem is agent experience. This is why as he explains, customer satisfaction scores typically never go above 77%. They think customers can be happier.
In addition, the company recently rolled out Logic and Actions which are bot-driven omni-channel workflows with drag-and-drop interfaces, NLU,NLP as well as access to data from third-party systems.
Other exciting additions- a mobile app is coming, users will have the same experience across devices such as web and desktop and finally, internal chat and file sharing.
Without a doubt, happier and better-trained agents can provide better service to customers and help improve CX and ultimately NPS. Sharpen’s focus on the building block of the contact center, the agent, is a great way to tackle the problem of improving customer satisfaction levels and ultimately building more profitable organizations.
