5 Steps to Improve the Efficiency of Contact Centre Employees

At the same time, customers’ expectations for the quality of service are constantly growing. An Intercom survey showed that 73% of support managers interviewed believe so. And only less than half of them (42%) are confident that their company meets those expectations.

Let's take a look at some contact centre management tools that increase employee performance and help improve customer satisfaction.

1. Automation

An important aspect of the operation of a contact centre is determining the key performance indicators of employees. Statistics are routinely kept in Excel spreadsheets, so all the data is in a huge file that requires special efforts to process and visualise the results. When the KPI assessment is based on different sources, discrepancy in the data and delays in the provision of information are inevitable.

Contact centre KPI management software automates the collection and display of data, thus ensuring flexible customization of the employee assessment system depending on the organizational structure and business objectives of the company. This saves significant time, reduces the number of disputes and enables prompt adjustments to the KPI system.

2. Monitoring Performance Indicators in Real Time

To effectively manage the operation of a contact centre, it is not enough to write down indicators at the end of a month. It is important to continuously monitor and visualise in real time the progress of goals, and bring it to the end user. This helps identify and fix problems before they impact customers’ loyalty and employees’ motivation. A unified portal for employees and contact centre managers displaying progress towards targets for each indicator makes it possible to take timely measures, increases the performance of the entire division and provides a high level of customer service. The portal also simplifies the processes of a centre, for instance, it makes it possible to abandon Excel in operational management.

3. Employees’ Motivation

Monitoring of individual indicators forms the performance rating of employees according to the total target achievement indicator as well as according to each type of KPI separately. The ability to track one’s position on a leaderboard adds a gamification element. Competition motivates employees to increase their performance, which positively affects the quality of customer service.

4. Quality Control Transparency

Selective call auditing is widely used by companies to monitor adherence to customer service standards. The inclusion of an audio monitoring module in the contact centre performance management program provides the manager with a full picture of the employee's performance that considers both the percentage of targets achieved and the service quality score given by the audio monitoring specialist. The audit of conversations is carried out in accordance with a questionnaire that takes into account all the company's standards for communication with customers. The transparency of the audio monitoring process lets the contact centre employees stay confident in the objectivity of assessment. Moreover, contact centre employees should be able to file an appeal when they disagree with the assessment results.

5. Training and Testing

An important step of organizing the operation of a contact centre is training of employees, both initial training of new hires and upgrading the qualifications of experienced employees. Therefore, one of the mandatory modules in the program for managing the KPIs of a contact centre is the module intended for training and assessment. The list of required courses, test schedule and analysis of test results help to identify the weaknesses in training of employees and set additional seminars.

A contact centre is the first line of interaction with customers. The waiting time, as well as the experience and attitude of contact centre employees, affect the customer's level of brand loyalty. Applying innovative contact centre performance management tools gives the company a competitive edge in a customer-centric world.

* Deloitee. Global Contact Center Survey, 2019