How to Increase Contact Centre Productivity Whilst Improving Customer Service

Turning underperforming agent A into high performing Agent BAnna Byrne from Scorebuddy investigates how contact centres can turn underperforming agent A into high performing agent B leading to an improvement in customer service

€œCan you imagine if your agents arrived to work on fire? Ready to use that 20% discretionary effort every day€¦" Contact Centres want to improve efficiency and quality; to optimize. Workforce Optimisation (WFO), Quality Management and Agent Performance were the topics tackled at CCMA's recent seminar sponsored by contact centre solutions provider, Noble Systems. Carolyn Blunt, Founder and MD of Real Results Training showed how agents (call centres' sales people) are tearing up ‚¬50 notes all day long when they fail to sell.  Using quotes from Walt Disney, Carolyn identified three reasons for agents to underperform:

  1. People
  2. Technology
  3. Leaders.

Focusing on the €œPeople€ aspect there were 6 areas in need of scrutiny; Recruitment, Induction, Managing the Psychological Contract, On the Job Training & Coaching, Soft Skills Development and Career Management. The 80:20 Pareto principal is highly suitable to the call centre industry; managers find that 80% of their time is taken up by 20% of agents€¦

So what about Agent A and Agent B?

The image in this post highlights how Agent A can cause manager headaches and Agent B is a cure. So what is the secret ingredient to transitioning your Agent from A to B? Coaching by applying the Pareto principal whereby the agent does 80% of the talking and the coach only does 20%. Charlie Snedden of Noble Systems discussed WFO and interactive analytics noting that between 2010 and 2013 there were more contact centres using Workforce Optimisation than Workforce Management (WFM). Forecasting was pointed out as the first step towards WFO with implementation of WFO gaining from 20-30% in FTE time, the challenge is in retaining that saving. Interactive Analytics allow call centres to monitor 100% of customer interactions and allowing analysts to only spend time reviewing calls that haven't been optimized. As this topic generated great interest in the audience a follow-up seminar was promised focusing on this €“ we look forward to it! If you have any additional input we'd love to hear - please comment below. Opinions presented in this blog post are those of the author and not necessarily those of CCMA. This blog was submitted by Scorebuddy.  Scorebuddy is a simple staff scoring solution allowing users to easily build their own scorecards for monitoring quality, take a 30-day free trial today at www.scorebuddy.co.uk.