Category: Customer Experience

Imagine a month of perfect performance at a call center:

Agents take incoming phone calls like clockwork.
Customers feel satisfied and drive up net promoter scores.
Stakeholders are happy with your quarterly reports and ability to meet call center goals.
You have enough staff to handle peak call volumes every day.
Agent attrition is at an all-time low.

Sounds like a call center manager’s dream, right? You can come pretty close to this scenario—all you have to do is learn how to monitor your call center performance!
Which Elements of the Call Center Should You Monitor?
Agent performance & engagement
Agent performance measures how your contact center agents fare in their day-to-day work. When evaluating your agents’ performance, you might consider: 

Attendance and punctuality
Completion and maintenance of training
Teamwork
Initiative
Steady progress toward goals and KPIs

You can keep records of agent performance through monthly or quarterly evaluations. Tech tools like the Fonolo Portal can also tell you a bit more about their call quality—more on that later!
How to Improve Contact Center Agent Performance
Agent engagement refers to how mentally connected your agents are to their work, their colleagues, and their organization. An engaged agent will show strong attendance, regular improvements and a willingness to grow with the company. On the other hand, an unengaged agent might take longer breaks or feel anxious about addressing phone calls. They also might not be receptive to feedback and may seem mentally “away.” Agent engagement is usually linked to strong performance, which means engagement is crucial to your agent’s success, and the success of your entire call center.
Bottom line? Both agent engagement and performance affect customer satisfaction.
Service delivery impacts customer satisfaction
Do you regularly have angry customers and low customer satisfaction scores? That’s one indicator of poor call center and agent performance. You can measure service delivery by monitoring phone calls for: 

Tone of voice
Script adherence
Amount of time needed for call resolutions

These indicators are usually strong predictors of an agent’s performance, but how do you measure service delivery from a whole call center? Customer satisfaction is a great place to start.

DID YOU KNOW:
92% of customers link an agent’s mood and perceived happiness to customer experience.

Speed and efficiency of delivery
Long hold times might point to an unengaged agent, but the problem is usually more complex than that and may be a symptom of a greater contact center issue. That’s why speed and delivery efficiency are strong performance indicators for your call center as a whole.
For example, low cSat scores aren’t usually an isolated symptom of poor agent performance. Your call center might have some efficiency issues around workforce management and training gaps that cause longer hold times, heightened abandon rates, and other indications of poor service.
Call center performance isn’t just about individual agents and metrics. Delivery speed, #customer satisfaction, and agent engagement all affect your outcomes. How do you measure #call center performance? Tell us in the comments!Click To Tweet
How to Monitor Call Center Performance: 5 Steps
1. Set goals & align them to KPIs
We all know how hectic the call center floor can be–revolving doors of new agents, constant training, challenging call volumes, and a steady flow of new tech are all part of an average day. Amidst the chaos, call center managers must give agents structured, measurable goals with clear benefits. Why?
Setting contact center goals helps: 

Improve call center agent engagement by allowing a sense of achievement
Unify stakeholders, agents, managers, and executives
Enable performance measuring

Goals should align with KPIs — first call resolution, average handle time (AHT), net promoter score, and customer satisfaction score are great examples.
So, you might have daily, monthly, or quarterly goals like these:

Improve FCR by 20% by the end of Q4.
Reduce negative social media comments by 10% by the end of the month.
Ensure agents score 80% or higher on tech training evaluations this week.

And if you don’t meet your goals? At least you can measure your performance using your progress toward those goals as a base.
How to Set Team Customer Service Goals
2. Determine a budget and responsibilities
How many labor hours will you dedicate to meeting your call center goals? You’ll need to budget accordingly and account for raises, supervisor and agent salaries, and leadership responsibilities. One way to monitor performance is to see how aligned your goals are with your budget. Are your resources going to good use?
3. Set your performance review schedule
How will you schedule performance tracking? Will you report findings every week?

Every month?
Quarterly?
Yearly?

Schedule your follow-up meetings and make your performance tracking process transparent for your agents. You might also consider scheduling a timely stakeholder meeting every quarter to keep you on track and remind you to report on findings.
4. Use scorecards and other technology
Scorecards are a fabulous way to simplify both agent and call center performance measuring. They usually include both an agent self-assessment and scoring by the contact center manager.

TIP:
We have a fantastic agent scorecard template you can use to track call center and agent performance!

The gist? There are two sections—one for contact center metrics overall, and another for individual agent performance. Managers who want to learn how to measure call center performance must consistently assess agent performance against the center itself. But a two-pronged approach can’t hurt, either. In fact, adding tech to your performance measuring will speed up the process and ensure data accuracy. Once you start using Fonolo’s Voice Call-Backs, you’ll be able to monitor your call-backs in real-time using the Fonolo Portal. You’ll get to access real-time analytics and valuable insights in rich reports. Which brings us to our next point:
5. Report on findings regularly
The best way to track call center performance is to report progress regularly. Our advice? Use tech to your advantage. Our software puts all your call quality data—metrics like call resolution time, hold times, and more—into rich reports to help you track call center performance and enhance your business strategy. You should also keep your agents in the loop on progress. Consider hanging a bulletin-sized snapshot documenting your overall call center performance every month or quarter. Of course, keep agent performance reports private, unless you’d like to recognize a successful agent!The post How to Monitor Call Center Performance first appeared on Fonolo.

Every year, tens of thousands of people get into a famous college of their choice. It’s not unlikely that someone will get in, it’s simply not certain that you will.

But someone will, so getting isn’t a miracle, it’s simply a long shot.

If you add a pound a day to the leg press machine at the gym, it’s possible to have the ability to press 250 pounds within a year.

It’s difficult and grueling, but not a long shot.

Neither of these outcomes requires a miracle. The first might have low odds, and the second requires persistence.

But a miracle is something that’s never happened before, and is not to be counted on.

In theory, this sounds like the “source of truth” for customers. Their purchases/lifelong spend, patterns on a website, sentiment(s), and reviews about their experience and purchase. In theory, this could be extremely valuable. You could segment customers and products in quite a few ways. Is a CDP a buzzword or does anyone know if these get implemented and that the success of those projects look like. submitted by /u/MonsieurKovacs [link] [comments]

Awards International announces the start of the UK Digital Experience Awards™ ’23, a premium awards programme celebrating top results and achievements in the UK. As of August 3, the seventh edition of UK DXA® will be officially accepting entries. Organisations from the UK are invited to showcase their digital achievements, submit their applications and participate in the race…
The post 2023 Edition of the UK Digital Experience Awards open for entries appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

Sooner or later, they’re all finite. And the way we allocate our time and emotional energy determines what gets done.

If we audited your day in six-minute increments, what would we find?

By the clock, how did you actually spend the time you given to you (we each get the same 24 hours). How much was spent on work? And the work time, how is it correlated with what creates the value you seek?

A question that’s harder to measure, but with far more impact, of the time you allocated, what was your focus and emotional drive spent on? What were the crises and highlights of the last day or week?

There’s generally a gulf between what we say we did all day and what we actually did. And there’s an even bigger chasm between the urgencies and emotional moments and the ones we know actually pay off.

When we give away our day, we give away our future.

“What other colors do you have that are not currently in stock?”

There are always more options.

If exploring them is the goal, please explore. And sometimes, the unavailable can lead to a breakthrough.

But if the job is to simply get the work done, it might be worth pretending that the unexplored options don’t even exist.

That depends.

Will the spec change after we begin?

Are we depending on supplies or inputs from other people?

Will the budget change?

Is this work that has been done by anyone before?

Is this work that has been done by this team before?

Is finishing it fast more important than doing it well or on budget?

Do you want to participate in the work (see the part about the spec)?

What are the incentives of the people working on the project?

How many different people are involved?

Are all the people, budgets and assets in place already?

Who is choosing the tools?

Pathfinding takes longer than path following. Discussions lead to changes in spec. Dependencies always add time.

I looked at how service promise differs to brand promise using the John Wick currency as a concept. In the John Wick movie verse the underworld’s economy is built on the exchange of special coins, it would be pointless to calculate a value based on actual money as the coin represents a social contract. Melting down the gold coin and selling the gold is not perceived as being worth more than what the coin represents. Recently published a video on the concept in relation to CX https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8Z7kSKSe4w&t=17s submitted by /u/CXinTheCity [link] [comments]

If you hand a good spec to three providers, you’ll get three variations back in return.

The way you know your spec is worthwhile is that you can live with the differences between them.

If it’s worth caring about, it’s worth writing down.

It is sometimes referred to as a “brand promise,” Your brand promise, simply put, is what customers can expect from your brand, but a service promise is different. While your brand promise details the company’s goals as an organization, a service promise focuses squarely on customers by outlining the type of experience they will have and how the company will deliver it every time. For more on this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8Z7kSKSe4w submitted by /u/CXinTheCity [link] [comments]