4 Ways to Enhance Call Center Agent Performance

Here at the CallShaper blog, we’ve talked extensively about the importance of effective training for call center agents, both as part of the onboarding process for new agents and as a way to maintain agents’ skills once they have been on the job for a while. But apart from traditional training programs, there are other techniques and strategies you can use to ensure that your agents’ skills stay up to date and their performance remains at the high level you expect. Here are four ideas for enhancing and optimizing the performance of your call center agents.
Real-Time Monitoring and Evaluation
Data is constantly being collected in call centers. Data like first call resolution, average hold time, average call time and customer experience metrics can (and do) paint a detailed picture of how effective your agents are. Even so, it’s impossible to know exactly what they are doing on calls without listening in every once in a while. Using a call center platform (like CallShaper) that allows you to monitor calls and silently listen in without disrupting the call gives supervisors the chance to see exactly what their agents are doing and how they are reacting to and treating customers. This not only allows them to collect specific data and training points to discuss with individual agents, but it may also reveal patterns of behavior or common mistakes that agents are making that can be addressed in the existing training programs.
Goal Setting and Rewards
This is a great hands-off strategy for keeping your agents motivated to perform at a high level. You can set individual goals for your agents or team goals for them to work toward together. You can create competitions and offer prizes and rewards for the agents and teams that achieve or surpass their performance goals. These are really effective strategies for large teams and teams of agents that are all based remotely, as it helps keep everyone engaged and working hard to perform at their best.
Role-Playing
Traditional training via written materials, scripted lessons or pre-recorded learning modules can only go so far towards preparing people for a role in which their primary job is to interact with people. That’s why role-playing is so helpful and important for making sure that agents are internalizing and putting into practice what they are being taught through your training programs. It also has additional benefits. Agents can role-play together, which gives them the chance to interact with and support one another in ways that they otherwise wouldn’t on a typical day of work. Supervisors and managers can also role-play with agents, giving them an opportunity to simultaneously evaluate and train agents in ways to optimize their skills.
Offering Personalized Feedback
Being a call center agent can be a lonely job, despite the fact that you spend all day talking to people. Especially today, when so many call center agents work remotely instead of in cubicles alongside other members of their team, people can begin to feel like they are on an island. This can lead to their performance slipping, especially if they aren’t receiving regular feedback. That’s why it’s critical to meet with agents and offer personalized feedback whenever possible. Two of the strategies above—real-time monitoring and role-playing—offer opportunities for supervisors to witness exactly how agents are performing so that they can provide specific, personalized feedback that will make agents feel supported and motivated to stay on top of their game.
Another way to enhance the performance of your call center agents is by providing them with a top-notch, easy-to-use call center platform like CallShaper. To learn more about the software, contact us today.