Identify the most important performance standards you will need to monitor, an ultimately optimize. Motivation, customer rapport, verbal skills, product understanding and listening skills are a few.
Choose quantifiable elements that are related to the performance standards.
Make sure all call center agents, managers, and employees are knowledgeable and informed of the performance standards. It is critical that each agent knows how, and what, they will be measured and compared to other agents.
Implement technology that enables you to monitor, and easy report on, the decided performance standards. It is best to automate the entire process, including reporting.
Customer feedback is clearly one of the most important standards to measure and monitor in your call center. Unlike other industries, the success of a call center agent depends entirely on customer feedback. Competency and motivational levels are the other commonly used means.
Competency
The competency of a person decides whether he has the skills and knowledge required to handle the job. This includes technical skills, as well as knowledge of computers, telephony systems, CRM databases, navigation of multiple software applications etc. More important is the person’s ability to articulate clearly, a desire to meet customer needs willingly as well as the ability to develop a certain rapport with each caller. It also includes an ability to tackle difficult situations and to turn complaint calls into sales calls.
Motivation levels
The success of an agent will depend on whether the person can adapt himself to the challenging atmosphere of the call center which involves tight schedules, constant monitoring, pressure to perform etc. It will also depend on whether the person is suited to the culture, values and environment of the call center.
Other than these, certain specific factors can be taken as fixed evaluators of performance.
The number of calls answered
The average speed of answer
The average talk time
The call percentage
The number of errors made
The number of calls which were left unanswered
The results of call monitoring
With regard to customer emails, the following factors can be considered as the criteria:
The average time that was spent per email from the beginning till the end. This should include the research and interdepartmental contact time that was required for the resolution of the issue.
The average time the email was placed in queue; the speed with which it was processed in terms of achieving response time objective.
The number of customer reminders or replies from customers via email because they were not replied to on time or the customer was not satisfied.
The number of responses from customers via IVR or VRU for the same reason.
The number of complaint mails about any kind of problem.
The number of emails handled by each agent. However, as with calls, the number here might not always be an indicator of good performance; the quality of each call/mail also matter.
The time spent on gathering information for closing each mail could also be an indicator of the quality of the technology, knowledge and skills.
The number of escalated emails also reflects the quality of the processes as well as of the agents.
