If you’re reading this, then most likely you and your company invest a significant amount of resources in the contact center, from infrastructure and technology to workforce costs and benefits. After all, it’s important to make sure that the contact center and the contact center agents are operating efficiently and providing customers with an exceptional experience in order to see a return on this investment. Equally important is the ability to extract data from the contact center – through conversations with customers and through workstations – in order to monitor and measure performance overall.
Another part of the equation is to make sure your contact center agents are satisfied with their role, and that they feel empowered to positively impact the customer, and valued as part of the customer experience process.
Happy employees can be the strongest asset a company has. With contact center agents interfacing over the phone every day with hundreds and thousands of customers, handling important customer issues, it is critical that these employees are satisfied with their position in the company so that they project a positive attitude and image.
However, monitoring call center agents can be tricky. Manually monitoring these conversations, either in real-time or through playing back a recording, is not practical or cost-effective. This makes it very difficult to truly understand and quantify what takes place during an agent-customer call, so companies are now relying on technology to capture and deliver precise, consistent data they need to effectively and accurately monitor agent performance, customer satisfaction, and the implications these factors have on business performance.
Reasons to Monitor Conversations between Agents and Customers
Businesses of all sizes and throughout all industries can access and extract critical business insights contained in the conversations taking place between their call center agents and their customers. There are many reasons why this information is valuable to the employer/employee relationship.
By monitoring calls between customers and agents companies can:
- Track agent performance and use the knowledge to improve productivity.
- Establish clear and measurable goals for employees and evaluate them based on those goals.
- Easily identify agent training opportunities to improve adherence to company procedures and policies.
- Identify top-performers and reward those agents to motivate them to continue their good work, and use these examples as motivation for mid-low performing or new agents.
By motivating and rewarding agents, companies are sure to achieve a higher overall quality of transactions due to the foundation of a happy, satisfied, and empowered workforce.
To do this effectively, technology is a necessity. Only an automated call quality monitoring solution can capture the agent-customer conversations, and extract business insights automatically; insights like agent performance based on KPIs, script compliance, and workforce training opportunities, to name just a few.
Once an efficient call recording and monitoring technology is in place, it makes it much easier to monitor call center agents and identify the top performers, which also tend to be the most satisfied and happy employees. On the other side of that equation, call quality monitoring tools will also reveal the agents that may need to improve their call-handling process, script compliance, and other company-specific goals.
Assess If You Should Use Call Monitoring Technology
If your organization handles considerable inbound call traffic to the sales, customer service, or call center departments, there is valuable information and customer data contained inside those conversations that you may be missing out on.
Go through these questions to assess your company’s need for a call recording and monitoring solution:
- Are you recording your calls with customers and analyzing them for quality assurance?
- Do you know how your company rates in customer experience and customer service?
- Are your call center and customer service agents staying on script in order to provide the best quality customer experience, comply with regulations and avoid risk?
- Can you access data on the customer experience in order to make strategic business decisions to continue pushing the business forward?
If you answered no to even one of these questions, you’re not alone, and there is technology available to help. This is where advancements in technology will be a tremendous help. Call recording technology, coupled with a call monitoring solution like speech analytics software, will automatically scan every call recording in split seconds, searching for just the calls that contain keywords and phrases that you specify as relevant to your business. With this technology solution, your contact center managers and operators can scan calls immediately to measure agent script compliance, mentions of specific marketing promotions to gauge marketing effectiveness, and agent performance on upsell and cross-selling activity.
Motivating Your Agents
Fielding incoming calls all day is a tough job. Call center agents are handling customer issues that range from trouble-shooting product issues, answering billing questions, and trying to diffuse unhappy customer situations. With a little investment of time and energy dedicated to these motivational techniques, you can ensure that your agents understand that you are on their side.
Motivation Techniques:
- Ask call center agents how you can improve the working environment. Is there a tool the agents need to do their jobs more efficiently?
- Ask how the company can improve service to customers. Are agents noticing a trend in what customers are calling about? Is there a way to anticipate the customers’ needs?
- Say thank you whenever you have an opportunity and recognize the difficult job your agents are facing every day.
- Praise well-performing agents any time you can, and reward them publicly so that they become role models and benchmarks for other agents.
Extracting Value from Customer Conversations
Your customers and agents have a lot to say while handling hundreds and thousands of phone conversations. With call center monitoring tools like call recording and speech analytics, you’ll gain immediate and automated access to the data you need to analyze the customer experience, agent productivity and performance, and take the initiative to make changes within your organization.