Areas to Monitor in Your Call Center

A recent study  by Craig Antonucci for BPA International, titled “Why Quality Monitoring is Important for your Call Center," touches on some areas you should be monitoring in your call center:

Critical activities. What activities make or break your call center? If you are a 911 dispatcher, being able to get the emergency group to the right home is the critical activity. Identify these critical activities and make them high focus, key measurements, and high penalty for failure at the agent level. If you fail to measure this, you might as well be the cook who doesn’t wash his hands.

Core job functions. Identify what the base job and scope of work your agent has been hired and trained to. For a PC manufacturer, the core function of technical support requires the agent to have a working knowledge of PC’s, Operating Systems, Software and General Troubleshooting skills.

Issue resolution. It is important to reinforce your agent’s success or failure to resolve the issue. If your agents can effectively be measured and managed by the previous two factors, most likely you will see success in this type of measurement. Be careful with this one though...don’t make it the driver for performance. Telling your agents that they did or did not solve the customer’s issue will not make them perform better.

Soft skills and call handling. This area should apply to every call center in the world. Your agents should know how to handle the call, be confident, be polite and professional to the customer and be able to manage hold, transfer and dead air as if it were second nature. While not as critical as problem resolution, call centers that do well with these skills on top of success in the previous areas see much more success. This is the polish of your process, the icing on the cake...it is what can separate you from being just a good call center, and being a great one.

Customer relationships. Your customers want to feel like you care. They spend their hard earned money with you, and in return they want to feel important. Acknowledging the customer’s issue with empathy, using their name in the call, engaging in conversation during dead air...all these things go a long way in turning a clinical service call into a personal relationship between your company and the customer.

David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.

Edited by Chris DiMarco

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