Customer support agents are the assets of a call center. They are completely responsible for driving in customers’ attention through their performance and improving the customer experiences. In other words, the agents contribute a lot to the call center productivity. Hence, call centers are introducing quality assurance software to maintain consistency in their workflow and upgrade their efficiencies.
A proper call center quality assurance strategy guarantees to boost the agent’s performance and drive more positive experiences for the customers. Let us dig deep to understand the need for QA software and the metrics to determine the performance analytics.
Stats and facts on employee engagement
As per the research by Smarp, 63.3% of companies find employee engagement more difficult than the employee hiring process. On the other hand, it is proved that employee engagement leads to higher work morale. Henceforth, boosting employee happiness and employee satisfaction is crucial to keeping the organization’s workforce engaged.
Based on the Gallup study, only 36% of US employees are engaged in their work, while 20% are across the globe. The reason portrayed behind the higher number of disengaged employees is bad work experiences and poor management.
Just check out the QA management in the retail and ecommerce industry. You will get an idea of how to focus on the QA strategy, the key metrics, and how they help improve agents’ customer support performance.
QA metrics to analyze agent’s performance
Here we have listed down the important QA metrics that help the agents in analyzing and improving their performance scores. It is easier to integrate quality assurance software to pen down the results.
First call resolution:
While monitoring and analyzing the agent’s performance, you must determine whether your agents are able to resolve the customer issues at the initial step. Many times, we find agents are unable to solve a customer problem and escalate to the senior managers. Even the policy and procedures hinder their call resolution process.
The first call resolution metric will help you in figuring out the number of calls completely resolved by the agents. This will give you an idea about how efficient the agents are at the job.
Average handle time:
Average handle time represents the time spent by the agents while interacting with the customer. Every customer reaching out to the call center expects the agents to handle their problems effectively. This happens only when the agents are good listeners.
The software allows you to measure the duration of interaction between the call center agents and customers. You can easily analyze how well the agents are serving the customers and optimize their workflow by figuring out this.
Customer satisfaction:
Customer satisfaction is the most crucial metric that identifies satisfied customers. With these metrics, you can learn the number of customers who are actually interested in your service and feel satisfied with the customer support solution.
Usually, the NPS metric and real-time customer feedback are utilized to measure the customer experiences and their satisfaction score. This shows how the customers rely on your agents and how they are proving themselves as a master in delivering top-notch solutions.
Call availability:
While you set out for QA management in retail and ecommerce industry, this particular metric needs to be focused purposely. The call availability score represents how often the agents are ready to answer the calls. Their availability doesn’t define that they are efficient in resolving customer queries. Instead, this allows the supervisors to schedule the agents based on their availability.
The metric allows managers to understand the efficiency of the agents based on their availability itself. This may sound weird, but that’s true!
Dial transfer rate:
Dial transfer rate defines the number of times the agents are escalating or passing interaction to the seniors or other agents. Measuring this certainly helps the managers in understanding the efficiency of the customer support agents, their knowledge, and their skillset. The more they pass interactions, the more they require proper training and development programs.
The management team often struggles to target the number. However, with the introduction of the QA software, it really becomes easier to pursue these goals and manage the agent’s performance.
A quality analyst never fails to work on these metrics when it comes to assessing the agent’s performance and productivity. They literally review the calls, listen to the interactions, go through the live chats and emails, and point out where the agents are going wrong. The metrics are effective enough to gain insights into the agent performance and optimize them for a better approach.
Never forget to include the quality assurance software to draft the reporting and analytics.
Read more: An Insight into QA Software for Call Centers
Measure and improve agent’s performance and productivity through empathy
Basically, you have plenty of easy ways to measure and enhance call center agents’ performance and productivity. One significant way is to build empathy. Empathy plays an important role when you are aiming to build optimal customer service.
No customer wants to feel left out when they reach the customer support executive. They want to be heard and experience a satisfactory approach. An agent should know how to greet the customers, understand their issues, take time and solve them in no time. Moreover, empathetic agents even celebrate customers’ success when they resolve a situation.
A few questions that can answer whether the agents are empathetic towards customers are –
- Were the agents interested in the customer’s story?
- Did the agents listen to the customer’s problems?
- Were the agents efficient at meeting customers’ needs?
Empathy is another way out to improve customer satisfaction instead of using the quality assurance software for agent’s performance analytics and improvement. You must not forget this while relying on this tool.
