Ever wondered how agents can be a strong backbone of the company? Alright, you ought that if your agents are not productive, you may lose clients plus revenue. So, to ensure ongoing success, your call center agents must boost performance — the question is — — how?
Don’t fret about it………we have come up with seven tear-jerking courses of action that will help you improve the performance of your call center agents.
Just recall the line, “Happy agents bring along happy customers”.
What is Agent Performance?
Agent performance is the measurement and evaluation of an individual employee or group’s effectiveness which they perform with their assigned tasks. It involves several elements like productivity, efficiency, customer satisfaction, and quality standards.
According to McKinsey “An efficient coaching program can increase agent performance by up to 30% in the long run”.
Agent performance is such a broad analysis of how agents are performing their tasks in a call center, KPI assessments help agent’s performance by monitoring key indicators such as call handling, first-call resolution (FCR), and customer sentiment.
On top of that, agent performance is referred to as the heart—driving contact center performance improvement.
How to calculate call center agent productivity?
Call center productivity is all about the estimation of how call center agents operate, considering resources like labor, time, and technology.
Anyhow, there’s a formula for calculating call center productivity which is:
Here;
Total Input indicates the time your agent spends on achieving their targets
Whereas, Total Output is the total time that they spend in their working schedule.
Let’s take an example for clear understanding;
Suppose your agent is spending 9 hours during their scheduled hours — -its total input
And, if they are spending 6 hours on work-related activities, their productivity rate would be like this:
6/9 X 100 = 67 %
7 no-nonsense ways to improve call center agent performance
Pondering how you can achieve optimum call center efficiency? Feel unburdened and let’s focus on some ways to carry out agent productivity which will directly impact their performance toward customer satisfaction.
Further down, we have disclosed 7 actionable ways to boost your call center agent performance.
Get Streamline your approach with effective call scripting
Call scripting is one of the uncomplicated ways to improve call center agent performance –it truly makes a difference. A good and well-written call script is a pre-written series of phrases that agents use throughout a call.
Believe me, call scripting has flexibility that empowers them with handling common problems, understanding customer pain points and lastly resolving them via offering solutions. Do you know how to write well-crafted scripts?
Dissolution of customers with automated set-up
Inaccurate distribution of incoming calls will smash agent performance. Just recollect that nothing can slow down your performance more than the poor distribution of inbound calls. This doesn’t mean that you need to hire any assistant ….NO- the ultimate solution is to set up automated skill-based routing and IVR systems for your call centers.
With Interactive Voice Response (IVR), agents are enabled with information about the caller before initiating with them.
Invest your money in ongoing agent training & coaching
If you want to ensure and improve your call center’s agent performance, ongoing training, and call center coaching are a must. Erect an agent training and coaching program simply focusing on drawback solution skills and taking customer-related decisions to enhance operational efficiency.
Think about investing in “refresher courses” with a variety of topics like how to deal with frustrated and angry customers or how to handle common problems.
Examine call center metrics to track agent productivity
Another significant way to enhance agent performance is to analyze certain metrics which will help you to focus on the root or cause of things. Such metrics are;
- No. of Inbound + Outbound Calls
- Total Time Spend
- Average Call Duration
- Average No. of calls per user
Make sure to examine call center metrics periodically to have full control over the productivity of each agent. Indecisive what metrics and KPIs you should be tracking?
Offer Employee Feedback Session
Regularly practicing sessions for feedback on interval periods is essential to keep your employees engaged and motivated toward their assigned tasks.
Many call center professionals found that the majority of employees want to get feedback at least once a month. Lack of feedback will directly impact the performance of the call center.
Around 92% of respondents agreed their performance improves when they receive negative feedback, commonly called constructive criticism.
Remember, companies that invest in employee feedback sessions have almost 14.9 % lower turnover rates! So, be mindful of feedback sessions, ensuring overall agent improvement.
Head off from the Avoidable Calls
When it comes to agent performance in call center operations, Time is everything…. But still, it’s essential to eliminate the repeated calls. When calls are repeatable, agents should head off from any call that needs to be avoided so that they get this time back to focus on other inbound calls that matter.
This can be done by blocking undesirable contact numbers, creating FAQs, or with an IVR menu.
Automate all your call center workflows
Automating all your call center processes will likely improve call center performance.
In one survey conducted by Gartner, “25% of customers support teams will integrate bot technology across their engagement channels”.
With the AI and chatbot revolution, call centers are optimized for serving good customer experiences. Automation can efficiently answer FAQs so that your agents get more time to work on more urgent inbound calls.
Automation enables agents to be prepared for each customer interaction by predicting how your customers will respond to an email, SMS, or call. You can also use a CRM system for collecting previous customer interaction for responding to customer needs and therefore improving accuracy along the way.
Conclusion
To be more precise, if you want to enhance call center experience and increase call center agent performance, our outbound marketing solutions are top-notch. Feel free to request a demo from our website. Our support team is always available and happy to assist you.
