5 Tips for Improving Agent Performance

Lucy Phillips at EvaluAgent explains how to improve your call centre agent performance and provides five tips for success.

Want to create an efficient call centre that provides customers with the best possible service? Taking small yet impactful steps to improve agent performance needs to be a top priority to ensure you harness the results that exceptional agents can bring to your business.

Coaching, training and motivating agents with the work that they’re carrying out will help ensure that agents are able to provide customers with the optimum level of service when they need it most.

With a 2023 study finding that 53% of agents would be keen to leave their organization within the next six months, improving agent retention and minimizing agent burnout is crucial for achieving sustainable success.

In addition to ensuring a healthy workplace culture within your call centre, here are 5 further tips for improving agent performance:

High Quality Training and Coaching

Over 74% of employees do not feel able to reach their full potential in the workplace due to a lack of training, coaching and development opportunities.

Within a call centre, adequate training and coaching is key to equip agents with the tools they need to provide your customers with top quality service.

Software packages and functions should be fully explained and demonstrated, with agents able to gain extensive hands-on experience before taking their first call.

It’s easy to overlook the importance of training in softer skills such as empathy and patience; however, these will be essential to agents when dealing with discontented or frustrated customers.

With 84% of a message over the phone communicated by tone of voice, simple etiquette such as smiling when answering the phone and not eating or drinking when on a call should also be instilled.

Any potential questions from agents should be encouraged and they should be aware of a direct channel of communication available to them for anything they need.

Companies that value learning and offer high quality training and call centre coaching see a rise of between 30 and 50% in the retention rate across their teams. Training and coaching within a call centre should be seen as ongoing and incorporated into day-to-day operations.

Review Calls

By recording and reviewing calls, agents can be provided with specific examples of how to, or how not to, handle calls.

QA (Call Centre Quality Assurance) should be a regular part of day-to-day business in any call centre, and it’s a useful way to review what’s been done and how to improve it.

Platforms use the most up-to-date developments in AI and machine learning alongside ChatGPT to help to accelerate the evaluation process.

By evaluating conversations and offering feedback within seconds, SmartScore can help evaluators get started, allowing you to support your QA team – without entirely removing human oversight.

Agent Feedback

To improve agent performance, it’s important to not only give feedback but also to listen to any feedback the agents themselves may have. As workers on the ‘front line’ they will be able to offer invaluable insight into what’s working, and what’s not.

Open communication often enables you to become aware of issues before they escalate. If agents provide feedback such as having issues with specific types of calls or software taking longer than necessary, make sure to take this on board and to act effectively.

It’s important for employee morale that agents feel listened to and able to suggest improvements where necessary.

Incentives

Did you know that 90% of top-performing companies use incentive programs, including gamification, to reward salespeople?

Everyone responds well to praise, and agents need to know when they’ve done a good job. Acknowledging hard work is one thing – but extending this to offering incentives, such as through gamified rewards, can be incredibly effective in driving agent performance.

Whether it’s financial incentives, days out or physical gifts, incentivizing agents can help to improve their performance and encourage them to reach certain targets.

Why not create a healthy level of competition by enabling agents to view each other’s results and awarding prizes to the top performing agents in different departments?

Set Clear Goals and Objectives

Putting KPIs and various other metrics in place is useful to ensure you have an accurate way of measuring elements of agent performance including average handle time or first call resolution.

Take the time to make sure that agents understand why you are using this type of metric and how it can benefit them and their potential career path within your call centre.

Using new technology and quality management platforms you’ll be able to quickly evaluate when goals have been reached – and reward agents accordingly.

This blog post has been re-published by kind permission of EvaluAgent – View the Original Article

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About EvaluAgent

EvaluAgent provide software and services that help contact centres engage and motivate their staff to deliver great customer experiences.

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Call Centre Helper is not responsible for the content of these guest blog posts. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of Call Centre Helper.

Author: EvaluAgent