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.
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.
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.
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 –
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.
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 –
Considering these negative impacts, you need to optimize the workflow for your call center agents. There are a few methods to do this –
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.
Handpicked article for you – Security measurements for VoIP business components |
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.
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 –
Type | Tools |
Helpdesk Software | Zendesk, HappyFox, Freshdesk |
CRM (Customer Relationship Management) | Zoho CRM, Bitrix 24 |
Survey | SurveyMonkey, Typeform, JotForm |
eCommerce | BigCommerce, Magento |
AI & Transcription | Refract, Modjo |
Productivity and Performance | Appy Pie, PieSync, Simplifier |
Communication with Various Channels | Intercom, Heymarket |
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.
You may also be interested in – Common Problems & Solutions for the Wholesale VoIP Providers |
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 –
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.
It is unfortunate that –
Only 65% of companies provide effective learning tools to their employees.
Source – BMC3
A 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 –
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.