How to track, measure & improve agent performance in your call centre

What’s on your contact centre wish list for 2023? Faster training, reduced agent churn, increased customer satisfaction and boosted revenues? If you’re keen to transform your operations this year, you can’t find a better starting point than taking a closer look at your call centre agent performance.

There are many ways to improve call centre agent performance and if you want to do it well, sometimes you have to bring the right tools on-board. It’s also about putting the right metrics in place so you have clear benchmarks to measure against.

But what is call centre agent performance? Call centre agent performance is indicated by the metrics you put in place that can help you evaluate individual agent performance and is likely to be influenced by the goals of your contact centre. For example, if your contact centre is a primary place for you to make sales, then you might focus on conversion rate and AOV. It’s about customer support, you may focus on AHT and FCR.

In this blog, we’ll explore how to track, measure and improve call centre agent performance.

What are the key call centre agent metrics?

An integral part of tracking, measuring and improving call centre agent performance is to set clear key performance indicators (KPIs) that can provide a baseline for improvement.

KPIs help you understand how your contact centre is performing against revenue expectations and customer targets. There are plenty of metrics to choose from, but if your goal Is enhancing agent performance, we’d suggest focusing on the following:

• Abandonment rate – Abandonment rate is a strong indicator of how satisfied your customers are. If they’re hanging up before speaking to anybody, it suggests they’re frustrated with the wait times and it’s likely to lead to a negative customer experience.
  
  
• Average handle time (AHT) – AHT tracks the amount of team your agents are spending on a call with customers. It begins as soon as the agent picks up the call and ends when they disconnect. Bear in mind that AHT includes automated greetings, call routing, holding times, and any time that agent spends on after-call work (ACW).  
  
  
• Conversion rate – Conversion rate is the percentage of people that make a purchase on the call. If your business relies on phone calls to convert leads into customers, monitoring conversion rate is key to understanding how effective your agents are at revenue-driven actions such as upselling and increasing average order value.
  
  
• First contact resolution (FCR) – FCR is one of the best ways of understanding how satisfied your customers really are. If you’re able to provide solutions without needing to escalate, transfer or handle a call back, you can be assured that you’re saving time for both your agents and your customers. Studieshave shown that for every 1% improvement in FCR, businesses also see a 1% improvement in customer satisfaction.

Whichever metrics you choose, metrics are one of the most effective ways of monitoring and measuring the performance of your contact centre.

What are the benefits of improving call centre agent performance?

The key benefits of improving call centre agent performance are:

• Engineer more satisfying customer conversations through highlighting common pain points that are likely to cause frustration and deliver solutions.
• Identify recurring topics and FAQs in calls and use this insight to streamline the customer journey by addressing them on your website or in marketing materials.
• Train your call agents more effectively with tried-and-tested scripts that are guaranteed to deliver more satisfying call outcomes.
• Improve upselling and reduce churn by identifying needs and solutions before your customer even thinks of them.
  
  

3 top tips to improve call centre agent performance

1. Empower your agents with the right tools

According to Hubspot, 93% of customers are likely to make repeat purchases with companies that offer excellent customer service. If you want to enhance contact centre agent performance, you should look for ways to empower your agents with the right tools, such as call monitoring and automation tools that can streamline workflows.

Call monitoring provides customer-centric data that allows your entire call centre to become better aligned with customer needs. It allows you to enhance the quality of your calls and deflect low-value ones by tracking keywords and conversational trends. And with automatic call scoring, logging and analysis, you can reduce admin such as after-call work (ACW).

2. Provide comprehensive and up-to-date training

With the right training, you could increase win rates in your contact centre by as much as 30%. The key is understanding which call centre skills are driving the desired outcomes, paying attention to what your best performers are getting right, and rolling that intel out across your training and scripts.

Speech analytics can unlock a wealth of insights that will set your agents up for success and make your call centre operations more effective than ever. For example, rather than saying ‘would you like to upgrade to first class?’ you might find ‘would you like more legroom?’ to be a more persuasive call-to-action. Simple adjustments can help you increase average order value, improve your upselling, and reduce cost per conversion.

3. Establish best practice for common problems

Your call centres handle hundreds, if not thousands of calls every day. Use customer intel to handle enquiries faster, minimising wait time and reducing the overall pressure on your call agents. For example, if you have a record of frequently asked questions or queries that can be resolved via other channels, such as your website or a digital self-service channel, you can work on call deflection by solving issues before they even start to dial.

Plus, handling minor queries elsewhere ensures your contact centres are focused on customers that are more likely to generate revenue. Speech analytics tools like Conversation Analytics are perfectly placed to help you monitor and analyse calls at scale. They can help you automate and streamline analysis, saving your agents time and giving you vital intel that will have a real impact on your business and improve call centre efficiency.

How Conversation Analytics can improve call centre agent performance

With Infinity’s speech analytics suite, Conversation Analytics, you can evolve your tactics based on real data from your customers. Being able to identify the finer points of conversation quickly and easily using call categorisation gives you the context and nuance that can be difficult to track when you’re handling high volumes of calls.

With Conversation Analytics, you can evolve your tactics based on real data from your customers, instead of relying on intuition. It can tell you things such as:

• Why people are getting in touch, by monitoring and logging the topics of conversation, including any associated keywords and phrases.
• The outcome of each call, so you can surface trends from calls that delivered positive or successful outcomes.
• How customer sentiment is changing throughout the call, so you can pinpoint exactly what makes the phone call experience positive or negative and improve from there.

When you put Conversation Analytics and Agent ID together, you can make your contact centre run even smoother. Gain actionable insight into how well individual agents are handling the calls coming in, and going out, of your contact centre. Uncover the best calls to use for training, rapidly upskill your teams and decrease average handling time, all while increasing conversion rates and ensuring that your customers are truly satisfied.

Every conversation matters. Book a demo with us today to unlock the benefits of Conversation Analytics for your business.