Contact centers are essential to most businesses, and their performance can significantly impact the company’s bottom line. It is necessary to have a well-defined performance management process to ensure that the contact center operates at peak efficiency. The five techniques below will help you ensure that your contact center is running smoothly and efficiently:
1. Quality Scoring
Quality scoring is a process of assessing the quality of customer interactions. This can be done through direct observation, call recording analysis or customer surveys. It involves listening to and analyzing agent conversations to help change agent behavior, ensure regulatory compliance, report quality as a KPI, measure customer experience, motivate the team, and evaluate individual quality.
A vital process in call center performance management is maintaining a quality score of each call, tracking when it came in, how long it lasted, how long did it take to answer, who handled it, how many times it was transferred and to whom, and what type of call it was. A high score indicates that the contact center provides a good customer experience and meets expectations. A low-quality score suggests that there are areas that need improvement.
Self-assessment is also an essential aspect of quality scoring, requiring agents to benchmark and evaluate their performance.
2. Coaching
Coaching is a process of providing personalized feedback and guidance to agents to help them improve their performance. This can be done through one-on-one meetings, group sessions, or e-learning modules. It involves setting goals, providing resources, giving feedback, and helping agents develop action plans. A good coaching program will enhance agent performance, reduce turnover, and improve customer satisfaction.
Coaching is an integral part of performance management because it helps agents understand what is expected of them and how they can improve. It also allows managers to communicate with teams and help agents develop their skills.
3. Creating Development Plans
A development plan is a roadmap that outlines an agent’s steps to improve their performance over time. It includes goals, objectives, and action items. Development plans are essential because they provide a clear path for agents to follow daily. They also help managers to identify training and development needs.
Developing development plans is a crucial part of performance management because it helps agents identify their goals and create strategies to achieve them. It also helps managers understand an agent’s development needs and provides a way to monitor their progress. These plans also allow organizations to track their employees’ successes and failures to identify their strengths and shortcomings.
Additionally, one should remember that while development plans are beneficial, they should not be the sole performance management process – due to their tendency to intensify pressure on agents. Organizations need to manage their contact center agents’ professional happiness, even as they try to understand how agents want to grow continuously. That is why it is advisable to coach and train with a defined objective, link goal-setting with each employee’s development plan, and not prioritize organizational targets alone.
4. Providing Feedback
Giving feedback refers to communicating how an agent’s performance affects the company. It also involves giving agents specific and actionable pointers to help them enhance particular areas of their performance. Feedback should be given regularly to ensure that it is effective. Using a performance management tool with an online feedback collection and analysis module is a good idea.
Feedback is essential because it helps agents understand the company’s expectations and role in the contact center’s overall success. Unfortunately, it is easy to overlook feedback processes when managers or supervisors are busy or caught up in daily KRAs. Managers that excel at performance management, on the other hand, don’t wait for the quarterly or annual reviews – they work on it on a regular and informal basis, aided by the appropriate tools.
Organizations can create a continuous feedback loop that guarantees frequent performance evaluations against their primary goals, informal conversations with individual agents, and real-time coaching with prompt feedback. Some of the key feedback types to note include:
- Peer-to-peer feedback, which helps agents gain from the expertise of their teams
- Real-time feedback, which identifies and addresses issues in the course of operations
- Two-way feedback, where agents review manager performance and share their opinion on the leadership
- Customer feedback, which combines customer CSAT/NPS with internal metrics to holistically evaluate an agent
5. Offering Incentives
Incentives are rewards given to agents for meeting or exceeding performance goals. They can be in the form of monetary rewards, paid time off, or other perks, depending on the nature of the organization. Incentive programs should be designed to ensure that agents are motivated to improve and maintain their performance. They provide a way for agents to recognize their hard work and achievements. Further, incentives also help create a competitive environment where agents strive to outperform their peers.
When designing an incentive program, it is essential to consider the organization’s goals and the needs of the agents. The rewards should be given to agents for workplace behaviors aligned with the company’s goals and can be tailored to the individual agents to motivate them further.
The most effective incentive programs are those that are well-designed and properly implemented. There are several ways to adopt an incentivization strategy, from social recognition in front of peers to compensation-based programs, where agents earn a commission on sales.
By taking a holistic approach to performance management and focusing on these five critical areas, contact centers can improve their overall performance and better meet the requirements of their customers.
