'Pick Up the Pace; Somebody's Watching!'

Third- party remote call monitoring is a great way to obtain actionable feedback on the performance of your call center agents. Sampling live calls and measuring agent-customer interactions against specific standards set forth by expert analysts is a fantastic way to ensure that your staff is creating the best customer experience possible. In fact, data and reports generated from 3rd party remote call monitoring has been shown to have tangible monetary benefits for companies that choose to leverage it.

But there is a hidden effect of 3rd party remote monitoring that is not derived from analyzing reports and implementing suggested changes to agent best practices. It turns out, people tend to work harder when they know they’re being watched (or in this case, monitored). This is known in the psychology world as the Hawthorne Effect.

The effect was first discovered by researchers at Harvard, during an experiment examining the relationship between productivity and work environment, namely, changes in lighting. Researchers discovered that observed increases in productivity actually corresponded to the amount of attention given by the research team, rather what they were originally testing for.

According to one online source, the result can be generalized as follows: “An experimental effect in the direction expected but not for the reason expected; i.e., a significant positive effect that turns out to have no causal basis in the theoretical motivation for the intervention, but is apparently due to the effect on the participants of knowing themselves to be studied in connection with the outcomes measured.”

It seems humans naturally perform better if they think someone is keeping track of them. So, there is scientific evidence to support the idea that 3rd party remote monitoring will help call center agents perform at a higher level, so long as they are made aware of the monitoring and receive feedback on their performance. This is simply in addition to the plethora of quantifiable benefits described above.

From tracking, reporting and analysis, to subconsciously motivating customer service agents, it is clear that 3rd party remote call monitoring is an indispensible tool for the successful call center.

Edited by Rory J. Thompson

Share this Page