Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Metrics Are the Last Answer in Managing Machines, Not Call Center Agents
The way we can track call center interactions today is nothing short of marvelous. We have recording solutions, screen capture, and analytics to interpret them. Every solution we use, from the telephony infrastructure to the workforce management - has reporting functionality. Managers can sit at their desks like Captain Kirk on the bridge of the Enterprise watching an overflowing dashboard of real-time stats and telemetry, or even view all these statistics on a phone or a tablet. Essentially, agents can’t breathe today without their managers knowing about it.
Sounds like it would be good for business, yes? Maybe, but it’s a horrific scenario for agents.
At the same time many companies are pursuing the neurologically connected and monitored contact center, other sources of intelligence are telling us that the number one guarantee of a good customer outcome is high employee engagement. According to a recent blog post by Jeff Toister writing for ICMI, nothing kills employee engagement in a contact center faster than breathing-down-your-neck micromanagement.
“Agents detest it,” wrote Toister. “Ask a contact center agent what he or she likes least about the job and you’re likely to hear a theme around micromanagement. The top three answers I hear are: rigid metrics, scripted workflow and lack of authority to fix problems.”
Customers aren’t keen on agents who sound like scripted robots, either. They want agents who use their brains to take some initiative to solve their problems. Customers find scripted responses irritating and unhelpful.
So is it time to throw all the monitoring and metrics out the window? Not at all. But instead of using these metrics to punish agents for every transgression, they should be used instead to help agents and processes improve. In other words, wrote Toister, don’t use them to mark agents’ papers, but instead use them to help agents get an “A” in class.
“Traditional contact center performance management has focused on marking papers,” he wrote. “Agent interactions are evaluated and scored. They’re informed of goals, metrics, and standards established by the management team. New procedures are constantly introduced as management scrambles to solve yet another problem. What would leadership look like if we instead partnered with agents to help them get an A?”
This may mean using all the data and metrics a contact center gathers to do activities such as allowing agents to participate in the quality assurance process and evaluate their own contacts; undertaking coaching sessions that focus on behaviors instead of scores; inducing contact center teams to work together to build better goals, metrics, and standards; and finding a way for managers and agents to work together to solve problems.
Hard numbers, gauges and alert noises may be indispensable when monitoring machinery or robots. But agents aren’t machinery or robots, and treating them as such will bring down the customer experience. Use your metrics instead to improve processes and encourage agents to strive to accomplish goals.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi