Positive customer experiences are a direct outcome of strong call center productivity. By staying on top of agent performance, you can maintain high levels of productivity and, as a result, keep customers happy and loyal.
In this blog post, we’ll give you 5 key tips to improve call center productivity, take a look at why it’s so important in the first place, and explore the best ways to measure productivity in your call center.
QA metrics are invaluable for measuring and evaluating agent performance. Some of the most important call center productivity metrics include:
Remember, tracking the numbers is one thing, but to actually improve call center productivity, you have to take this data into the real world and act on it.
For example, low first call resolution for calls that involve a lot of troubleshooting could signal weak product knowledge among your team. In this case, you could make a point of prioritizing technical knowledge and troubleshooting skills in upcoming coaching sessions.
QA managers can use agent scorecards to track (and improve) call center performance. These scorecards can help you identify issues so you can focus your efforts on problem areas and take corrective action quickly.
The right quality assurance platform will allow you to customize scorecards so they’re tailored to your needs. For example, you can track performance across specific channels, make sure best practices are adhered to, guarantee regulatory compliance, and more.
By customizing scorecard criteria for your specific requirements, you can ensure that you’re not just improving general productivity, but you’re actually pushing agents in the right direction to achieve wider organizational goals.
Once you’ve shown your agents where they’re doing well (and where they need to do better), you’ll also need to provide guidance on how to continue improving.
Using the information from your scorecard evaluations and QA reports, you can create training sessions that help agents reinforce what they’re good at and motivate them to improve their weak spots. To keep it interesting, mix and match your training methods:
Employees say they’re 3.6 times more likely to do outstanding work when they receive daily feedback (vs. annual feedback) so make it a priority. This shows agents how to improve and reminds them that they matter, leading to both stronger engagement and higher productivity.
Spending all day dealing with irate customers and complex (or repetitive) issues can be mentally exhausting. Couple this with other issues like ineffective management, poor work-life balance, lack of career opportunities, and you’ve got a recipe for agent stress and burnout.
Working with your employees to create a more positive environment can make a huge difference to your call center productivity.
So, how can you do it?
It’s not just about your agents, either. The software and systems within your call center all make an impact on how effectively your agents can work. To improve workflows and efficiency, try technology like:
AI-powered tools can connect to your CRM systems to give agents more information on callers, improving workflows, processes, and personalization. Plus, many of these AI solutions can pull information from internal knowledge bases to help agents with difficult queries—or even supply real-time tips and guidance.
Call center productivity is a measure of efficiently and effectively your agents handle customer interactions. High productivity ensures that customer issues are resolved quickly and accurately, resulting in a better customer experience (and, in many cases, lower operating costs).
With only 23% of employees feeling engaged in their jobs (and 15% actively disengaged), it’s no secret that how your employees think affects more than just their job performance. Beyond just impacting company profitability, productive and engaged employees lead to:
To promote productivity, you need a clear understanding of customers' wants and needs. Today's customers accept nothing less than exceptional customer service—and 65% have moved to a different brand because of a negative experience.
Plus, customers are over 5 times more likely to recommend a brand after an excellent experience, which shows how call center productivity (and efficiency) can impact your business over time.
In your call center's deeply connected world, agent productivity has a ripple effect on success. It impacts customer satisfaction, first call resolution, average handle time, abandonment rate, and even your bottom-line cost/revenue metrics.
Call center productivity metrics tie all of these outcomes together, helping managers:
Just as a rising tide lifts all boats, a rising productivity rate lifts all your KPIs, and improved staff performance is at the top of that list.
One of the biggest factors contributing to low call center productivity is not having the right tools for your QA process. If you can’t monitor and analyze how agents perform, you’ll struggle to find where they need to improve (or what they don’t know).
Effective QA requires insights into how reps handle calls, their soft skills, and how they interact from start to finish. They allow you to track important call center productivity metrics in real-time, which gives your evaluators a chance to work with agents and set goals for improvement.
When your agents are stuck behind complex, outdated, or poorly designed workflows, productivity suffers. Tedious tasks like data entry, finding customer information, and wading through un-integrated systems lead to long handling times—and disengaged, frustrated agents.
Streamlining processes by adopting automated tools or overhauling them by listening to agent feedback can make a huge difference in how your team gets work done. And by doing so, they’ll be better equipped (and more willing) to help customers instead of feeling stuck.
Agents who aren’t properly trained are less likely to resolve customer issues efficiently, which negatively impacts both first call resolution rates and average handling times. Consistent training sessions will keep them on top of their game (and engaged in their work).
Using QA software to personalize training sessions to the individual needs of each agent helps reinforce what they’re good at while also providing help for weak spots. Coaching efforts also give them more agency within their roles, which can motivate them to become more productive.
A disengaged or burnt-out workforce can severely hurt call center productivity. If adequate support isn’t there in such a high-pressure environment, agents can quickly feel overwhelmed and stop being productive. When morale is low, performance suffers too.
Well then, how do you prevent it? Try:
Open communication between agents and management is key to maintaining productivity and creating that sense of community we’re talking about. If your team feels they aren’t heard or aren’t receiving enough (or the right) feedback, they’ll disengage, and their skills will stagnate.
Creating a culture where feedback is encouraged, and communication is welcome helps build skills and foster continuous improvement. Open door policies and positive, constructive meetings among the entire team uplift everyone—and boost productivity.
Working with outdated, ineffective technology can slow down even the most skilled agents. Software that crashes, doesn’t integrate with your existing tools, or doesn’t offer real-time analytics can dramatically impact call center productivity.
Invest in modern, scalable call center solutions that give you streamlined interfaces, seamless integrations with your QA software and CRM, and detailed analytics. Adding these tools will enable agents to focus on the customer experience instead of fighting with their computers.
Tracking the call center productivity metrics that matter most is key to understanding your team’s performance and spotting trends that could be impacting productivity. Metrics like AHT, CSAT, and FCR give you a snapshot of how well your team is doing.
But just collecting this data isn’t enough to improve productivity. You need to analyze it to make a difference. Your QA software should be able to take that data and turn it into detailed reports and insights that you can use to make data-driven decisions to boost productivity.
There are several tips and tricks managers can use to measure agent productivity. Among the more effective is maintaining a central focus on customer experience, as it ultimately determines call center success or failure.
Empathy plays a vital role in the overall customer experience. When an agent shows empathy, a call is typically lifted to a memorable, above-and-beyond experience.
Everyone remembers a customer service experience in which they felt the person on the other end of the phone truly shared their frustration and understood what they were going through. Conversely, when a customer feels your agent doesn't care or appears disinterested, they're likely to abandon your brand.
Monitoring the right metrics is key to understanding (and improving) your call center’s productivity. By focusing on specific key performance indicators (KPIs), you can spot areas for enhancement, streamline operations, and boost agent performance. So, what do you track?
Call centers can be demanding, which means staying productive is tough. A lack of proper tools, disengaged or burned out agents, and slow, inefficient workflows can all hinder your productivity and damage customer experience.
However, tracking the right performance metrics, building custom scorecards, reinforcing agent skills, creating a positive work environment, and using the best tools can make all the difference. Improved agent morale and user experience means a happier, more productive call center.
With Scorebuddy, you’ll have the power to overhaul your QA process and uncover the data you need to drive improvements in your call center. Get a demo of our AI-powered quality assurance platform today to see how it enhances productivity.
