Call Center Performance

5 Strategies for Effective Call Center Operational Performance

Working in today’s call center is a demanding job. The simplest of transactions are now often handled via self-service tools, leaving more complex work left to today’s agent. Effectively leading today’s call center agent can be even more challenging. From handling escalated calls, upset customers stressed-out agents, and endless to-do lists; the list of challenges tends to get longer and longer. This leaves an interesting question – how do you lower stress levels for your team members? How do you keep their moods up, so that they are bright and cheery treating each new customer as if they were their first of the day? How do you improve call center performance to ensure your team member, company, and clients get the necessary results they need? Here are five clear strategies to implement for effective call center operational performance. 1. Effective Sourcing   An ideal time to hire call center agents is at the start of their career, usually when they are entry level. Be open to those with little previous work experience. By starting the development process early, you can prepare workers with valuable experience to become not just high-performing agents, but future supervisors and managers. There are many ways to attract employees who are at the start of their careers. Here are just a few tactics to consider: • Provide paid internships for students fresh out of college or during their college breaks. • Attend workshops and conferences at high schools to market your company as a desirable employer. • Allow flexible work schedules, so that students may work part-time, while attending college. 2. Employee Incentives   Once you’ve increased the pool from which you can draw permanent workers for your call center operations, the next step is to be a desirable employer. If your goal is to attract mostly young workers, then it’s important to note that flexibility and work-life-balance are extremely important to millennials and Gen Z, often even more so than a high salary. Here are some incentives you should consider that will benefit your older call center workers, as well: • Opportunities for professional development • Fun and creative experiences • Innovative tech in the office • Flexible work schedules • Give back initiatives 3. Employee Training   Many call center operations leaders make the mistake of believing employees only need training for their first few weeks on the job. Others have training programs in place just for the sake of having them, with no real process and no real way of measuring their effectiveness. By investing in proper and frequent employee training, you are building an unstoppable workforce. In fact, Forbes recommends frequent employee training as the key to organizational success. Besides the obvious knowledge improvement, how does this benefit call center operations? See below for a few key benefits: • Reduced need for supervision • Increased productivity • Lower turnover rates • Improved efficiency • Decrease in errors • Improved morale 4. Employee Empowerment   One great benefit of employee training that deserves a section to itself is employee empowerment. By providing call center employees with the knowledge and tools they need to make informed decisions, management can turn its focus back to admin and strategic functions. The workers, in turn, can focus on achieving company goals without a manager breathing down their necks. As mentioned above, employee empowerment leads to a reduced need for supervision, which in turn helps to flatten the organizational structure. Flat organizational structures are more efficient and more adaptable to change. They also boost customer satisfaction as workers reduce resolution times by resolving issues on their own, thereby reducing the need to forward customers through multiple channels. 5. Health & Wellness Focus   According to a 2014 study published by the U.S. National Library of Medicine, there are some health conditions that become a risk for workers at call centers. For starters, because of the 24/7 nature of call center operations, many people are usually working at times when they would have otherwise been sleeping, causing disruptions to their internal clock. Interpersonal relationships with family and friends may also be negatively affected, often resulting in unhealthy lifestyle habits. Additionally, the need to suppress negative emotions to please customers may also lead to depression and anxiety. Because of this, it’s very important that companies focus on health and wellness programs for employees. Some perks, such as a creative space for breaks, can help with this. However, there should also be solid employee benefits for both mental and physical care. In addition to this, employers should implement measures to reduce or prevent employee burnout. Every call center has its own organizational culture and strategies in place to ensure high call center performance. However, sometimes organizational culture can work against improvements and sometimes strategies become outdated. By making small tweaks to those original strategies, however, you can transform your call center business, keep your workers in great shape and generate a return for stakeholders. For more information on how partnering with Etech can help, contact us at info@etechgs.com. This blog was earlier published on LinkedIn.

Five Frequently Asked Questions About Using Call Monitoring to Improve Performance

Ensuring that your agents are producing successful calls depends on much more than a thorough initial training. Quality management should be ongoing, involving regular training and constantly updated goals. Managers often implement a system of quality assurance using call monitoring to improve performance on a continuous basis. Here are a few frequently asked questions about call monitoring and quality management to get you started on the path to continuous call improvement. How Can I Engage Agents During Call Reviews? Regular team reviews are an essential part of quality management. Sharing good and bad calls to discuss what went wrong and what went right gives the group a glimpse into techniques that work for individuals and areas to improve on. It is also important to provide one-on-one monitoring with an agent and a manger after a call. This is an excellent way to give personalized attention and reinforce what managers look for when reviewing calls. Whether you are performing a group or individual evaluation, a few steps will further engage agents in the call reviews: Ask the agents to think of calls that would be helpful to review. Avoid pointing out every issue yourself during a call review. Let the agents find the mistakes and positive aspects of each call. This keeps the agents actively listening and thinking about quality. It also avoids the feeling of a management lecture. Add customer feedback into the discussion. How Do I Interest Agents in the Monitoring Process? Let the agents help decide quality measures you use during call monitoring. Involving agents in quality assurance helps them understand the process behind call monitoring and become invested in it. The focus should be on exceeding customer expectations and monitoring from a customer perspective. Asking agents to take a customer’s point of view creates better quality measures. It also reinforces the concept of customer respect and empathy. How Should I Schedule Call Monitoring? Make sure that you have a predictable schedule for coaching: Rotate listening and coaching through the teams on a weekly basis. Make sure each agent has recent feedback and is anticipating and working toward the next established review. Plan your staffing so that at least one agent at all times can be off of the phone and experiencing quality monitoring. How Can I Keep Agents From Returning to Bad Habits? Before a coaching session ends, make sure every agent agrees with the goals set during the session. Get verbal confirmation that each individual is 100 percent behind every goal. Monitoring and training should include clear goals and extend beyond listening to calls for lasting effects: Ask top performers what is working for them. Team up good performers and less successful agents. Do not end the session if anyone is wavering or seems unsure of goals. How Can I Reinforce Good Habits? Make sure to mention the positive to each agent during call monitoring. Immediate concerns tend to focus on negative aspects of an agent’s performance, but starting with a positive comment reinforces quality work, creates an incentive to continue good habits and opens an agent to your less positive feedback. Call monitoring is a powerful tool for improvement. Involving agents in the review process and in creating quality measurements gets them invested in monitoring and provides them with methods to improve performance. Continuous quality improvement starts with call monitoring, helpful reviews and reinforcement of excellent work.

How to Raise the Emotional Intelligence of Your Call Center Staff

Emotional intelligence, or EQ, is the skill of being able to understand how others feel and using that information to influence how you can proactively interact for a positive result. While some employees may inherently have a high EQ, it can be nurtured to grow in all staff, improving interactions between agents and callers across the board. Using EQ, an agent can guide a call from its beginning to a successful resolution while simultaneously adjusting the tone and language of the call based on listening to and engaging with the customer. Management and training staff can create an environment to foster high EQ in all call center agents and improve customer satisfaction. Here is how you can increase EQ in your own call center. Positivity Call center agents’ positive and proactive attitudes help the interaction between the agent and customer get started on the right foot. In order to foster these attitudes in the call center at large, managers need to make agents feel cared for and important to the company’s mission. Creating a fun and cooperative atmosphere between management and staff is a good way to foster positivity and the first step in encouraging EQ to grow. Self-Awareness and Control Training for agents to be aware of their phone persona is the next step in developing a higher EQ. These questions can be asked and the answers discussed during training sessions and call critique sessions: How do I sound to the customer? If a call center agent answers a call in an abrupt manner, this will probably set an unfriendly tone for the entire call, with the customer gaining a negative perception of the company. Am I making the customer feel welcome? If the customer is not extended courtesy, diplomacy, and respect, the customer may feel they are an unwelcome guest and escalate the call in order to get their need for information and service met. How can I stay in control and guide the call to a satisfactory conclusion? Angry callers are a regular occurrence, but a call center agent can control her response to the angry feelings at the other end of the line. Staying in control by remaining objective and calmly responding to the caller’s request can transform the emotional energy of the call and guide it to a satisfactory conclusion. Adaptability The skill of being adaptable to a wide spectrum of customer attitudes and requests is built on the ability to be positive and proactive as well as self-aware and in control of customer interactions. Training agents how to respond proactively to difficult callers will raise their confidence and help them to perform at their highest level. Rewards When agents see that peers in the workplace are being rewarded for their high EQ during customer interactions, this sets the tone for higher agent EQ expectations overall. As a result, a culture of excellence is fostered to improve the customer experience. Ask high performing agents to serve as mentors for new hires to reinforce this expectation of excellence. Training, mentoring, and peer engagement can make a difference in a call center’s EQ. When positivity is fostered, training is implemented, and performance feedback is given, you call center performance will be poised to improve exponentially. This blog was first published on LinkedIn.

How to Use Call Center Performance Metrics to Achieve Success

Call center managers are charged with a tough job, because supporting customers means constant revision to your process, so you move with their needs and deliver consistent quality. Understanding how your various KPI measurements work together to give you an idea about the balance of your services is an important first step to achieving success as a manager, and it is also the key to understanding when your call center is succeeding, so you avoid over-tweaking your process and overdoing change in the name of call center performance. Understanding the Four Metric Categories The four main areas of concern for call center managers are: Service Quality: Measuring service quality means looking at whether or not your call center meets customer needs efficiently, asking questions like: Do your employees have the knowledge and resources necessary to act decisively and solve problems? And how is customer feedback reflecting training efforts? Accessibility: These metrics allow you to track use of your self-service system, wait times, and call abandonment, and they tell you whether or not customers have a hard time actually reaching the point where service quality comes into question. Inaccessible systems tend to be rated more lowly on service quality, too, even when actual call center performance at problem solving is quite excellent, because accessibility issues affect the customer’s perception of the entire process afterward. Operational Efficiency: Metrics that cover call wrap-up time, forecasting accuracy, the average handling time for each call, and your employees’ adherence to their schedules are all designed to ensure that high quality, accessible work is also efficient enough to handle the call load your center receives. Cost: Last but not least, cost considerations ensure you operate within budget by measuring cost per call, agent attrition, and absenteeism to give you a full picture of your call center’s effectiveness. Balancing the Metrics Knowing what categories to measure and which KPIs are most important in each category is just the first step. To achieve the best possible call center performance, managers also need to understand how to balance the metrics, to achieve success in every area. Otherwise, cost effective and efficient call centers may still be hampered by training issues or accessibility problems that reduce their overall performance, and similarly, the best and most accessible service is unsustainable if costs are too high. The issue is more complex than that, though, because some areas affect others in direct ways. For example inefficient but high-quality service typically means long wait times and less calls processed. This creates a situation where accessibility goes down even as service goes up, and the long run, that can lead to service quality measurement declines as customers who have been kept waiting remain dissatisfied and stressed even after receiving the service they desired. The goal, then, has to be achieving success in all four areas without focusing too intently on one, unless that one happens to be lagging behind. Training efforts and organizational restructuring, as well as the investment in new resources, needs to be balanced to address the needs of all four categories at once, as well. That allows for better overall call center performance, and, more importantly, the kind of success that is sustainable into the future.

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