Sales and customer service reps and employees are often the first line of contact between your business and its customers. Therefore, their performance can directly impact how successful your business or call center is. Call center performance management is a surefire way to test and review employee performance and provide room for improvement.
What is Call Center Performance Management?
Call center performance management refers to the tracking, analyzing, calculating, and improving of agent and employee performance. Whether you run a virtual, remote, or on-premise call center, conducting performance management and reviews is important to determine how your agents are performing and how satisfied your customers are.
How to Manage and Improve Performance in Your Contact Center
Customers often reach out to a business to gain information about a product or service or to resolve an issue they are facing. And when they do so, they are almost always expecting a quick response, low wait times, friendly interaction, and a quick resolution. And so, your agents should be able to provide:
- Personalized and friendly customer service
- Improved first call resolution
- Fast call resolution during the first call (in other words, high first call resolution rates)
- Simple handling of the problem
- Service for any additional issues
Call center performance management is tracking whether your agents and employees are able to do the above while upholding company standards. And then, training them appropriately, if they fail to meet your standards. The goal is to help your agents provide high levels of customer service and enhanced caller experience. Identifying where they are failing can help you as you help them succeed.
Measuring Call Center Performance Management
Call center performance management includes evaluating agent performance during customer interactions and how they line up with business goals. The best way to conduct performance management is to identify and use KPIs applicable to your business. Some KPIs to consider are:
- Customer satisfaction scores (CSAT)
- Average handle time
- First call resolution
- Average speed of answer
- Average response time, and more
To measure the performance of your call center, first set realistic business goals. Then, use contact center software to learn about average handle time, wait times, conversions, first call resolution rates, customer satisfaction goals, and so on. By studying these metrics you can get a good idea of the strengths and weaknesses of your employees. As a manager, you can then make well-informed decisions about workforce management and ways to improve customer service.
Contact Center Performance Management Tools
1. Call Center Software
Your call center software can help with tracking important KPIs and metrics through call logs and activity reports. On-premise call center software is run by the company while a virtual call center software is hosted by a cloud server. The type of call center software you should choose depends on how much control you want to have over the software as well as your in-house IT team.
2. Contact Center Metrics and KPIs
As mentioned above, call center performance management includes tracking and measuring agent performance. Use relevant call center KPIs to study and optimize agent behavior before, during, and post calls.
3. Inbound/Outbound Call Recording
Use hosted call recording to listen in or review calls. These recordings can also help you train new employees by demonstrating acceptable and unacceptable agent behavior.
4. Coaching and Training
Use training material to continue training customer service employees on ways to reach and maintain company standards. Refresher courses, workshops, webinars, software tutorials, etc., can come in very handy.
Start Optimizing Agent Productivity!
Call center performance management will not only help you identify your team’s strengths and weaknesses but will also show you what steps need to be taken to optimize productivity and efficiency. This can help your call center offer better customer service and improve customer satisfaction. Start today!
