It is a common pitfall for contact centres to try and measure the granular elements of agent performance using highly specific KPIs, only to lose out on the big picture. KPIs like CSAT, FCR, and ASA might tell you about particular aspects of an agent’s performance but cannot indicate how good they are at their job holistically. This is where agent quality scores come in.
Quality scores are used by contact centres (primarily inbound) to capture and record an agent’s overall potential. Let’s quickly explore the concept further and discuss how you could go about using agent quality scores to improve performance.
What is an Agent Quality Score? Definition and Components
You can define the agent quality score as a cumulative metric that encapsulates how different stakeholders in a contact centre perceive the agent’s performance and are satisfied with their interaction as per specific parameters. Typically, the score will give varying weightage to three components:
- Manager review – The internal component that captures how effectively an agent meets the contact centre’s goals and maintains its average quality standards. This component usually gets the highest weightage when calculating agent quality score
- Customer feedback – The external component that reflects a customer’s satisfaction or dissatisfaction with a specific agent, independent of following internal procedures and benchmarks. This component is also critical, as it tells you the real-world impact of an agent’s performance
- Agent self-review – An increasingly popular component that considers an agent’s potential (apart from actual performance), by giving voice to their self-motivation, drive, and performance improvement goals. This component offers visibility into workforce engagement and motivation
Manager/supervisor review could account for 50% or more of the total agent quality score, with the remaining two components together making up the rest.
How to Conduct Managers Reviews to Gather Agent Quality Scores?
To obtain an accurate scorecard, managers must rate agents on the following parameters:
- Skills – Did the agent meet all the skill expectations during interactions? This includes product skills, soft skills, as well as language skills
- Process adherence – Did the agent follow all processes from call preparation to wrap up without delays? This will vary based on your business
- Compliance – Did the agent comply with regulations around customer interactions, obtaining and recording consent at every step?
- Targets – How completely was the agent able to meet their call targets?
You can break down each element into a variety of sub-questions, asking managers to score each agent working with them on a scale of 1-10 for every question. The average score across parameters, coupled with a similar average from customers and the agents themselves — as per the percentage weightage — will give you the total agent quality score.
How to Improve Agent Quality Scores?
Agent quality scores are an actionable metric, which means that we should use these numbers as a starting point for contact centre decisions. Observe places where the agent self-reports a skills gap, take customer feedback into account, and ensure managers provide a fair and objective review. These tips will help to gradually push up scores and improve overall performance at your contact centre organisation.
