Call Center Management Featured Article
Call Recording and Quality Management Can Help You Replicate Top Agent Behaviors
Is your contact center made up of the very best agents? In your dreams, perhaps. While every call center has a couple of ringers managers wish they could clone, the truth is that in order to keep the call center staffed, many contact centers are full of “good enough” agents and even a few “could be a lot better” agents. But what if you could turn the latter two types of agent into the types you wish you could clone?
Many managers write off contact center skills as inborn – agents either have “it” or they don’t. This is an assumption that should be challenged. Training is the way to accomplish this feat, but before a training program can even begin, a contact center needs to understand what “it” is. The best way to accomplish is this by recording, monitoring and analyzing calls to determine what works best and what doesn’t work at all, and following up by reinforcing the former behavior and discouraging the latter.
In a recent blog post by Monet Software CEO Chuck Ciarlo, we learn that it’s at least as important to listen to the customer on recorded calls as it is to listen to the agent.
“When you can listen to the customer in his or her own words expressing their satisfaction with or objections to a call center engagement, you’ll know very quickly which agents are doing their jobs, and which part of your scripted copy is achieving the desired results,” wrote Ciarlo. “Call recording software allows for random call monitoring, so managers can listen in on calls without agents knowing which discussions are being reviewed. That provides a more accurate reflection of a typical customer engagement. Review a cross-section of calls from each agent, from each shift and from each of the common call categories (order placement, order cancellation, questions, complaints, etc.) to get the full picture.”
From here, you can determine what scripts – or at least what behaviors by agents – lead to positive outcomes, which lead to neutral outcomes and which lead to negative customer responses. Chances are good that even your best agents have room for improvement when it comes to some of their approaches. By adding a quality management component to the process, contact center managers can create a quality assurance scorecard that helps agents understand where they are with best practices and use those scorecards to emulate the behavior that simply works better.
“Start by creating a quality assurance scorecard to measure agent demeanor and performance as related to KPIs,” Ciarlo recommends. “Then score each call based on the scorecard and your preferred grading system. These scorecards provide a clear picture of how well each agent and the call center as a whole are doing, and where additional training is needed. You may discover, after repeating this process periodically, that even a small change in greeting or the insertion of a positive phrase or upsell effort can make a big difference.”
So while you may not be able to clone your best agents, you can certainly use quality monitoring and management to determine what their winning behavior is and train other not-so-stellar agents to emulate it. In the end, the agent, the customer and the company’s bottom line all win.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi