Call Center Performance Evaluations & Your Agents
How your call center agents interact with customers can have a profound effect on your business. One negative interaction could mean losing a customer for life. Call center performance evaluations must go beyond simply listening to calls. Here are 3 tips for evaluating performance that will help your agents achieve success on any call.
1. Know Your Agents’ Strengths and Weaknesses
Each call center agent has areas where they shine, and areas where they struggle. You need to find those areas and react accordingly. With automated agent scorecards, you get an unbiased scoring system that evaluates each agent based on criteria you select.
These evaluations are consistent, reliable, and fair, and can apply to both individual agents and teams. Scorecards give you the data you need to see where agents may need extra training, and where they should be praised. Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of your employees is the first step to any evaluation process.
2. Teach Your Agents’ Skills They Can Use
This may seem simple at first glance, but you’d be surprised by how many contact centers do not coach agents on specific skills. Of course the ultimate goal is to end all agent-customer interactions with the best possible outcome. And the only way to guarantee this is to make sure they have the necessary skills to handle any type of call.
This includes teaching agents empathy and active listening skills. And there are tools that can help you do this. For instance, silence and overtalk detection identifies both agent knowledge gaps and subpar listening skills. By the same token, sentiment analysis and emotion detection give you metrics on how the agent or customer feel during, and at the end of a call.
You can then use this information to coach agents on specific skills that will improve their overall performance. As your agents feel more empowered, they will achieve their goals and ultimately improve the performance of the entire call center. Plus, you will enhance your approach to call center performance evaluations and your agent coaching sessions.
3. Don’t Leave Agent Compliance to Chance
It is crucial to know exactly what your agents are saying on every call. This isn’t just true for monitoring the customer experience, but for legal ones, too. Heavily regulated industries can face heavy fines and costly lawsuits if their contact center agents are not 100% compliant. Automated speech-to-text transcriptions let you easily read and search the transcriptions of all agent-customer interactions, so you can be sure your agents are saying all the right things.
Agent Training Doesn’t Stop After Their First Day
To paraphrase “Glengarry Glen Ross,” call center performance comes down to ABT: Always Be Training. Agent training shouldn’t stop after the first few weeks on the job; it should be an ongoing process. These tips can give you the tools you need to make sure your agents constantly learn and grow, leading to both happier agents and customers.
And if you want to learn more ways you can improve agent evaluations and coaching, schedule a demo! We’ll show you how CallFinder provides everything you need to have highly skilled agents, and a highly efficient call center.
