Everything is linked to agent productivity.
The productivity of your call center may help you assess if you’ve employed the proper amount of people and whether their efforts are producing results for your business.
Assuring agent productivity is crucial, just as monitoring call center performance is essential to improving customer happiness, as attrition is high in call centers or contact centers. Besides improving profitability, and productivity, engaged employees boost morale and customer satisfaction and foster a better workplace environment in call centers.
Understanding your customers’ wants and needs is essential for improving productivity. Today’s customers expect nothing less than the best in customer service, and 50% leave after only a single bad experience.
Furthermore, around 60% of unhappy customers post unfavorable reviews of their experiences on social media, which can have a long-term detrimental influence on the reputation of your call center.
So, agent productivity has a ripple effect on success in your call center’s connected universe, and all these factors are closely connected with each other. Customer satisfaction, initial call resolution, average handling time, abandonment rate, and even your cost/revenue KPIs at the bottom line are all impacted by productivity. Quality assurance software with options to measure these KPIs and metrics can be an excellent aid in measuring and improving productivity.
The information from QA metrics connects each step in the performance chain for your call center. Call center managers can use these metrics to:
- Combine and contextualize data;
- find opportunities for improvement;
- operationalize insights;
- change behavior; and
- get a quicker return on investment from all workforce resources.
A rising productivity rate elevates all your KPIs, and enhanced worker performance is at the top of the list.
Measuring productivity through empathy and customer experience
Assessment of Productivity QA metrics is essential for monitoring and assessing agent performance through empathy. But it is equally crucial to use the findings to raise call center productivity. Empathy plays a significant role in customer experience. Emphatic behavior from an agent makes a call memorable and above-and-beyond experience that customer tends to remember. A person on the other side of the call truly understood and shared their frustration and what they are going through, making the customer feel assured and they trust the agent and brand will resolve their issue or at least try their best to do so. On the other hand, when they feel that the agent is not listening to them carefully or is not interested in their issues, they will get more frustrated and move to the competitors.
Measuring empathy is possible through QA metrics. Quality analysts should review calls and measure how well the agents have engaged with customers and if they have listened carefully to their issues. Also, QA must review how flexible the agents were in the call when meeting customers’ changing needs and how convincing they were in the call to instill confidence among customers. Artificial intelligence-enabled quality assurance software is offered to identify the sentiments of customers and agents and the customers’ overall experience. Instead of simply how many calls agents attended, a competent QA solution will help to measure how many calls agents have attended and successfully resolve queries or issues, creating a positive experience.
How to measure and act on the outcome of the QA metrics to improve productivity?
Quality metrics are essential for improving performance, but these metrics can be equally crucial for enhancing the productivity of the agent and the call center.
QAs, supervisors, and team leaders can use Agent Scorecards and management to monitor contact center performance. Agent scorecards can assist you in identifying unsatisfactory performance so that it can be changed. Moreover, they can be customized to serve unique demands and requirements of quality assurance for tracking particular channels, best practices and compliance requirements, and results that are vital to your call center. These results will also help improve the agent’s productivity by identifying the bottlenecks as well as the drivers of productivity.
The ideal guide for training your agents will be developed once you create a robust contact center quality assurance system and agent scorecards based on your business goals and what makes for a positive customer experience. The outcome of the quality assurance software and the experience can be integrated into the agent’s e-learning management systems to enrich their training systems and improve performance and productivity.
Once these are incorporated into the training of the agents, considerable improvements will be seen in response time, call handling time, strategic use of verbiage, and improved communication with customers. These improved metrics and factors show better productivity and performance in the call centers. Agents adept at managing customers’ issues and queries will take less time to complete calls or contacts. Moreover, decreased response time and call handling time will enable agents to handle more calls, increasing their productivity and quality of services simultaneously.
Wrap Up
Agent’ productivity, performance, and quality of services are closely intertwined. For example, an agent taking more calls but failing to resolve customer issues cannot make a contact center profitable. At the same time, well-trained call center agents capable of wrapping up calls or contacts faster than others will naturally take more calls than their peers. So, agents’ productivity must be measured in tandem with other QA metrics and factors with efficient quality assurance software.
