Call Center Agent Performance Improvement Plan: The 10 Proven Ways

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Increase VoIP Termination Call and Route Business in 2023
Increase VoIP Termination Call and Route Business in 2023
Call Center Agent

Regardless of what you are doing, you must enjoy it. This is the main motto of effective and successful work. The same goes for call center agents. Believe it or not, a call center agent can deliver 10 times better service to their customers when they are enjoying their roles and performing without restrictions. You can’t expect all employees to enjoy their work, especially when it comes to calling center services. That is why you or your organization needs a call center agent performance improvement plan.  

10 Best Practices to Ensure Call Center Agent Performance Improvement Plan

You will be surprised to know – almost 61% of consumers transact with a business after experiencing poor customer service. There are many factors to define poor customer service, but call center agent performance is surely one of the most influential ones. Therefore, we are going to explain 10 proven ways to improve call center agent performance.

  1. Monitor All Channels 
  2. Concentrate on Net Promoter Score (NPS)
  3. Establish a Feedback and Consistent Routine
  4. Optimize Workflow
  5. Assign Special Tasks to Agents
  6. Focus on the Low Performers
  7. Tools For Call Center Agents
  8. Recruit Smartly and Selectively
  9. Build a Strategic QA Framework for Call Center
  10. Improving Agent Performance with Proper Training

Monitor All Channels

This step is considered the very first step of a call center agent performance improvement plan. If your organization follows an omnichannel method for customer support, then you should configure your monitoring system and practices accordingly. 

Often, organizations focus more on providing quality customer support over the phone. That being said, the support offered via email, live chat, and SMS should also be given priority.

Concentrate on Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Making clients happy and collecting positive reviews from them is the ultimate concern of call center agents. To ensure this, measuring the Net Promoter Score (NPS) is very important. This can help you to gain positive customer experience operationally, strategically, and tactically. 

But how to implement Net Promoter Score (NPS)? Well, there are 7 steps – 

  1. Prioritize customer calls
  2. Identify the poor performing agents
  3. Interact more with your customers and ask for feedback
  4. Measure QA from time to time and make it a part of your daily schedule
  5. Implement an Effective QA Framework
  6. Deliver Continuous Support
  7. Merge Various Departments into One

Establish a Feedback and Consistent Routine

Establishing feedback and a consistent routine should always be a top priority to improve a call center agent’s performance. Building a feedback system will get you positive and negative feedback in the form of surveys, scorecards, KPIs, etc. To make it happen, you need to find the low-volume time and put it to good use. Again, establish a consistent routine where you preserve an amount of time for customer support rather than providing support sporadically. 

Optimize Workflow

Do you know? 

74% of call center agents are at risk of burnouts whereas 30% are at severe conditions. 

From a survey conducted by Aberdeen, agents often struggle and face roadblocks when it comes to – 

  • Finding information to help customers (14%)
  • Outdated technology and infrastructure (26%)
  • Scarcity of updated technology and process (25%)   
  • Collaboration with customers (39%)
  • Lack of real-time access for find data (25%)
  • High-performing agents turn over (25%)

Considering these negative impacts, you need to optimize the workflow for your call center agents. There are a few methods to do this –

  1. Update support tickets and how will answer them.
  2. Create an organizational chart to assign particular tasks to specific individuals.
  3. Configure KPIs to track productivity and performance.
  4. Segment customers’ service requests and categorize inquiries. 
  5. Test workflow by constantly taking different approaches.
  6. Create a knowledge base with the most common questions to enable self-service.

Assign Special Tasks to Agents

Treat your call center agents like any other employee. Assigning them to special tasks is a part of motivating them. The call center agents will feel like valuable members of the team. They will be motivated to provide better customer services. This can act as a better training program for your agents while promoting a better way for career progression. 

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Focus on the Low Performers

Rather than getting rid of the poor performing call center agents, you should give special care and focus on them. Train them properly with constant improvement. Generate a goal-oriented mindset for all your call center agents. If necessary, boost the KPIs of the low performer agents. They say it has the most visible improvement on your agent’s performance. 

Tools For Call Center Agents

Your focus on the poor-performing call center agents can be improved by providing them with the right tools. Aside from the basic equipment like a reliable internet connection, a computer, a headset, or a fully-featured cloud-based phone system (if it is required), there are some software integrations like below for improving agent performance in the call center – 

TypeTools
Helpdesk SoftwareZendesk, HappyFox, Freshdesk
CRM (Customer Relationship Management) Zoho CRM, Bitrix 24
Survey SurveyMonkey, Typeform, JotForm 
eCommerce BigCommerce, Magento
AI & TranscriptionRefract, Modjo
Productivity and PerformanceAppy Pie, PieSync, Simplifier
Communication with Various ChannelsIntercom, Heymarket

Recruit Smartly and Selectively

To ensure constant, efficient, and quality customer support, hiring the best personnel is the foundation. If you think the person that you have hired recently can’t perform as you expect, then you need to update the hiring process with smart and rigorous practices. Go through every step of your hiring process and identify the steps that are less effective. Refine the whole process of recruiting your call center agents.

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Build a Strategic QA Framework for Call Center

It is hard to achieve call center agent performance goals without a strategic QA framework. You or your organization need to implement a planned QA framework to ensure an effective call center agent performance improvement plan. For instance, Martin-Hill Wilson (Founder of customer service and customer experience consultancy, Brainfood) introduced the following strategic quality framework chart – 

Call Center Agent Performance

Implementing a planned and strategic QA framework is paramount to improving call center agent performance. This is the best way to evaluate agents who are performing accurately. 

Improving Agent Performance with Proper Training

It is unfortunate that –

Only 65% of companies provide effective learning tools to their employees.

Source – BMC3 

Learning Management System (LMS) can be a great tool to train and educate your call center agents. As a result, they can improve their skills. LMS can train quickly through an automated training process. Also, employees can track and manage their learning achievements. 

An LMS tool can help your call center agents in the following ways to train and develop their skills – 

  1. Providing effective on-board training to all your employees.
  2. Track and measure your training goals with QA metrics.
  3. Developing the learning materials.
  4. Measure the overall improvement with reports.
  5. Nurturing the poor performers with one-to-one engagement.
  6. Rewarding and incentivizing the top performers.

To Conclude

There! We just showed the 10 best practices for a call center performance improvement plan. Honestly, all these 10 methods are result-oriented and they will improve the performance of a call center agent without any doubt. So, you haven’t applied the above practices to improve the performance of your call center agents, then implement them as soon as possible. We can guarantee you will thank us later.

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