Highly engaged employees are 480% more committed to helping their company succeed. And companies with high levels of employee engagement improved by 19.2% in operating income, while companies with low levels of employee engagement declined by 32.7%.
One of the keys to exceptional employee engagement and call center operational efficiency: is setting SMART goals in the call center.
SMART goals help you identify legitimate opportunities for improvement and create a work environment that is both engaging and successful. Put, without SMART plans; your call center won’t readily recognize when it’s on the right track or not and thus won’t improve as quickly as you expect.
But setting call center SMART goals is easier said than done. Let’s look at what SMART goals are, why they’re essential, and how you can put them. Then, we’ll finish up with a few SMART objective examples for call center agents to get you started.
SMART goals stand for goals that are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Based. These are all the essential qualities of practical goal setting that lead to calling center success.
A SMART goal provides an outline for success. There should be no guessing about who’s involved or how you’ll accomplish the goal. It should provide all the necessary details to ensure that everyone in the call center is on the same page and that your work is organized and productive. And similar sentiments can be applied to objectives.
Call center goals and objectives are often used interchangeably, but that’s not entirely correct. They are two different ideas.
It would help if you had both objectives and goals to be successful. The good news is that SMART goals help you create objective-like plans. And this is important for helping you figure out what you’re going to do, how you’re going to do it, how important it is, who’s involved, and when it will be done. In this way, you’ll have a concrete plan for success and evidence of that success when you’ve accomplished your SMART goals.
“There are many who subscribe to the convention that service is a business cost, but our data demonstrates that superior service is an investment that can help drive business growth. Investing in quality talent and ensuring they have the skills, training, and tools to empathize and actively listen to customers are central to providing consistently excellent service experiences.” - Jim Bush, Executive VP at American Express.
If you want quality talent and excellent customer service, you need to set SMART Goals. With SMART goals, your call center can determine how to:
Call centers that develop and implement a list of SMART goals can improve their performance at every level. Plans provide your call center with the clarity you need to prioritize how you spend your time and energy, guiding every decision. After all, goal setting and improvement go hand-in-hand.
In addition, when you set call center SMART goals, you automatically bring a sense of achievement to the call center. Your agents know what they’re trying to accomplish beyond answering call after call and responding to chat after the chat. This means your agents will feel like they’re contributing to the overall company, which increases engagement, reduces employee churn, lifts morale, and improves customer experience outcomes.
So, how do you set SMART goals?
A good Call Center Quality Assessment program allows coaches and managers to identify and correct agent behavior that doesn’t support the center’s level of customer service. There is also a massive advantage in allowing agents to improve their performance by identifying shortcomings in their skills or behaviors. Self-awareness enables the agents to fully participate in the goal-setting experience and feel more vested in operations and outcomes.
Here are a few ideas for how your call center management can help agents set SMART goals.
To set SMART goals in the call center, everyone on the team needs to be involved. Whenever everyone agrees on the benefits of a specific purpose, everyone will work together to reach that goal. That’s why empowering agents to identify their own goals is so critical.
Agent engagement is critical for call center quality assurance and goal setting. Attrition can be a big challenge for call centers. Still, highly engaged organizations can dramatically reduce staff turnover by instituting ways that agents can be more engaged in their careers and the business overall.
Engaged call center agents:
If your agents are engaged and empowered to set their own goals, they’ll take ownership of them and be accountable for meeting them.
Transparency within your SMART goals and attached quality assurance monitoring (audio, thread, screen) increases understanding and trust. As a manager, it is essential to communicate your agents' expectations and then do your best to inspire, motivate, and persuade them to accomplish those goals.
One way to do this is with agent dashboards, where contact center QA metrics and scores are visible in real-time. In this way, managers can keep agents informed, allowing them to modify their behavior immediately based on how well or poorly they are achieving desired outcomes.
The key is to have dashboards that include-quantitative QA metrics (such as eincludempathy cultivation, following company procedures, and value-added) and quantitative metrics (NPS, first call resolution rates, etc.)With all this information available at the touch of a button, both agents and managers pinpoint deficiencies and proficiencies when meeting goals.
Real-time feedback accelerates performance improvement while self-scoring enhances autonomy, self-directed learning, and upskilling. This is critical to getting the most out of your SMART goals.
Create a real-time call center quality feedback loop using scorecards to get records. Here are a few ideas:
During the training of new and current agents, there are opportunities to identify goals that have been successfully implemented and those they need to focus on for improvement. It’s also imperative to identify agents who are meeting their targets and those who are struggling. This knowledge is helpful for peer-to-peer training, gaining insight into best practices, and highlighting pain points for agents.
An LMS for your call center agent training can help you work your SMART goals into every training session and one-on-one while providing precise and measurable insight. With an LMS, you can:
Now that you know how to set SMART goals effectively, what are some examples? There are countless SMART goals that your call center could set. It all depends on your top call center challenges and the type of customer experience you want to provide.
However, while the contact center's goals vary significantly, a few SMART goals for call center agents should always be included.
Call center agent and management roles are demanding. Staff turnover can be high. Finding, hiring, and training the best people for the job takes time and money. And it is always a challenge to employ employable agents.
Determine your agent churn rate and then decide how much you want to improve it over a specific period. This should provide your call center with a benchmark for success and employee satisfaction, morale, and engagement.
If you don’t provide customers with the experience they want and expect, they’ll choose to do business with someone else. According to HubSpot, nine out of ten customers will stop purchasing from a company after three poor customer service experiences.
By reviewing your NPS (Net Promoter Score) and CSAT scores, you can figure out how to improve the customer experience operationally, tactically, and strategically. This is the gold standard for measuring customer experience and brand loyalty. With improving NPS as a goal, you’ll be able to determine how well your agents perform o,n which tunnels you excel, how often you resolve issues, and if your customers are satisfied.
To ultimately handle your customer’s questions and support tickets without transferring customers between agents or departments, you need to know how to optimize your call center workflow. To do this, you need to manage your customer support queue for positive results effectively effectively
This might mean developing a new organizational chart, prioritizing support based on channel, task, or customer service request, and enabling self-service. In this way, you can more accurately forecast your staffing needs and create an efficient workflow where customers get to the right agent the first time.
Your lists can include a wide range of call center KPIs that your agents can consist of in their SMART goals consist of a shortlist to keep in mind when setting these goals:
Whether you use customer satisfaction surveys after every call or you have her waof asking for customer feedback, you probably get a lot of it: good, bad, and neutral. One aim for your call center should be to respond to all of this feedback regularly, whether it’s positive or negative.
With positive feedback, you want to respond so that you work on building your relationship and creating a stronger connection with the customer. With negative feedback, your response is an opportunity to prevent churn and figure out how you can improve. And with neutral feedback, you have the chance to determine how to move the dial in a positive direction.
You show your customers that you are genuinely interested in hearing what they have to say by responding to feedback. And when customers feel that you genuinely value their insight, they’ll be more likely to stick with you over the long term.
Call center agents should always be looking to upskill and improve their performance. As a manager, you can recommend the new skill to be learned, or it can be a new skill chosen based on agent interest. In either case, by making a SMART goal about acquiring new skills, not only do you work training into the weekly schedule, but your agents will be happier.
With new skills, your agents’ jobs will feel more accessible, their daily work will have less friction, and they’ll feel more satisfied. This reduces agent churn, increases customer satisfaction, and enhances your call center performance.
Lastly, there’s no reason that your SMART goals should not include call center training. High-quality training is how your agents improve their performance, close knowledge gaps, increase their soft skills knowledge, and enhance the customer experience. Make regular call center training a goal for every agent and allow them to choose the best training courses for their needs.
One way to do this is by breaking down your education-based goals into steps and learning paths. For example, you can create a sales learning approach for agents who need to improve their sales skills with courses such as Intro to Sales, Sales Enablement, and Sales Software. And you can create another learning path for empathy, customer service, and live chat.
As long as your agents have access to an extensive catalog of courses they can pick and choose from for self-directed and instructor-led learning, they can make continual progress.
The only way to know if your SMART goals are practical is to track their progress through quality assurance processes. QA scorecards are designed to measure contact center performance at every step. They help your agents understand how their behaviors impact their goal achievement rates and call center outcomes.
When agents are engaged with their quality scores and understand what and why their scores are based upon goals, performance is greatly enhanced. Giving agents access to real-time quality scores can allow them to continuously adapt behavior rather than wait until the end of the month for their review.
Using digital scorecards to keep track of SMART goals can help you capture the performance data that is most important to your contact center in real-time. You can then take the analytics and insights provided to make radical improvements. And by arming your contact center with scorecards that highlight trends, uncover patterns, and identify strengths and weaknesses, you can make better SMART goals and decisions moving forward.
