Study Examines Quality of Agent Listening Skills

There are coveted skills that call centers look for in agents to help ensure that they can drive high-quality customer service deliverables with measurable expectations. Experts at CCF Online recently conducted an industry assessment to evaluate the agent’s ability to find out the customer’s implicit and explicit needs. Only in successfully completing this step in the interaction can the agent hope to completely satisfy the customer’s needs.


To complete its study, CCF decided to look at the skills required to effectively deliver this element of the customer interaction by making a number of calls to call centers. The first skill to be examined is that of listening skills. Without the ability to properly listen to the customer, it is impossible to determine their needs and satisfy those needs within the interaction.

CCF found that while a number of call center agents were able to provide a warm or welcoming greeting, many of them had difficulty transferring that level of service into the next part of the call. In other words, the agents were able to offer a great welcome, but couldn’t listen to the answer to “How may I help you?” At the same time, other agents offered cool greetings, yet delivered effective call resolution.

 

To evaluate the listening skills of the call center agents, assessors examined four criteria, including first time capture of information, appropriate use of verbal nods, confirming and clarifying information and picking up on inferred customer needs.

Each participating call center and agent was given a score based on a 100 percent scale:

 

·    Under 25 percent:  Poor customer experience. Urgent investigation and action required. 

·    25-50 percent: Functional level of customer service. Improvement recommended. 

·    50-75 percent: Good level of customer experience. Certain elements may need enhancement. 

·    Over 75 percent: Excellent customer experience.

 

As a whole, participating call center agents received an average score of 52.5 percent in first time capture of information; 36.9 percent in the appropriate use of verbal nods; 36.9 percent in confirming and clarifying information; and 19.4 percent in picking up on inferred customer needs.

The assessment also found that in 5 percent of calls, the agent remained silent whenever the customer was speaking. It is important that agent’s verbal nods are not intrusive, yet more encouragement is needed while listening to the customer. It can be necessary to prove to the customer that they are still engaged in the call.

The evaluation of skills demonstrated in the first-time capture of information would suggest that agents take care to confirm that they have understood correctly any areas that were unclear. The results of the assessment do not support this view.

Instead, 15 percent of calls contained no confirmation of information by the agent and only 11 percent of calls made assessors wholly confident that the agent in question had correctly captured all the data they were given.

The research also found that in more than 40 percent of cases, there was no evidence that the agent handling the call had any interest in the bigger picture, such as the needs of the customer beyond one very specific inquiry.