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Measuring Contact Center Workers' Effectiveness

Measuring Contact Center Workers' Effectiveness

August 13, 2014
By TMCnet Staff

Agent performance is one of those things always top of mind for call center management. They have to report to those in the executive suite and they often have to justify their processes, metrics and even mere existence. It’s no surprise that the call center is quite often viewed as a cost center, which can stress even the most experienced of leaders. Fortunately, call center services that capture operational data can quickly link that to agent performance and demonstrate their value.


A recent blog posted by call center services provider inContact and written by Christina Cowell, product marketing manager at inContact, highlighted how this can be done automatically within the call center. The post points to the challenge in so many call centers when management is trying to achieve workforce optimization goals without automation in place. In fact, ICMI discovered that 66 percent of their call center managers were not using automation to tie agent performance to operational data, creating significant headaches and leaving too much room for human error.

This also means that too many call centers are failing to leverage call center services in the cloud. Of the contact center professionals surveyed, 84 percent are not fully utilizing the cloud and the automation capabilities available. Several have yet to adopt workforce optimization automation, although many do view it as a priority.

According to ICMI findings, 47 percent want the ability to automatically move agents among the channels according to volume; 45 percent would like to update schedules automatically; and 40 percent want the ability to build volume forecasting models automatically. Such automation could help tackle some of the common scheduling challenges, including adherence, sufficient funding and the management of real-time changes in workload and availability. Automating the capture of data to reinforce decisions would take a number of these elements off the table completely.

It’s hard to justify the purchase of additional call center services or the hiring of new agents when the information you need to back up the argument is difficult to capture. It’s also hard to justify the amount of time spent manually capturing this information when training initiatives are left unmet. The reality in the call center is that supervisors have too much to do to rely on manual processes at all – especially those that justify the numbers.

At the end of the day, justification for all activities will never go away. But if that information is captured automatically and available with a simple navigation to the dashboard, leadership would always have that data in real time. This leads to quicker decisions and the ability to keep pushing for positive outcomes without focusing too much time on justifying the activity in the first place. 





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