All of our worlds have been turned upside-down recently due to the novel Coronavirus pandemic. Like most businesses, you likely had to put a quick, emergency plan in place to get your contact center agents the technology and resources they needed to be able to successfully work from home.
While you may have encountered some challenges along the way, you did it! Which is definitely worth some virtual high fives, but here’s the next question – how’s it going?
Are your contact center agents performing better than when they were in the office? Maybe worse? How are your managers and team leaders able to maintain transparency and keep a pulse on agent performance with a distributed contact center? All questions that agent scorecards can help answer.
Improved Agent Performance = Improved Agent Satisfaction = Improved Customer Satisfaction
Agent Performance = Agent Job Satisfaction
Have you set clear, metric-driven goals and expectations for your contact center agents? If so, great! You have already mastered step one of understanding how your agents are performing. If not, there’s no time like the present to start putting goals into action, but you may be asking, where do I start?
Every operation is unique, and you’ll need to find the right mix for your team, but we recommend using the below data points and calculations as a starting point. Once you understand your contact center’s averages, you can set goals and expectations for your agents.
Data
- Interactions
- Talk Average
- Hold Average
- ACW Average
- Total Average
Calculations
- Efficiency
- Adherence
- Quality
As many of you seasoned pros know, setting goals is just the beginning. The grind comes in spending countless hours, on a regular cadence, pulling together the data for each of your team members to know where they stand in relation to those goals, or relative to the rest of the team.
This continuous feedback, though time-consuming and difficult work, is crucial for both your team’s performance and their morale. If they are hitting those goals, that’s awesome! Let them know and celebrate the wins. If not, it could be an opportunity for some additional agent coaching.
Agent Job Satisfaction = Customer Satisfaction
“Clear and quantifiable agent performance standards also have a positive impact on job satisfaction.
– Jeff Rumberg, Metric Net.
So why is this cycle of quantifiable feedback and engagement with your agents so important? Why does it matter that this impacts their satisfaction? Measuring performance is not the only factor in contributing towards happiness and satisfaction of your agents, but it does contribute significantly to the sense of purpose and realization of the impact your agents have and what they bring to your mission. Receiving affirmation for where they are crushing it, and coaching them in areas where they could crush it more is a vital ingredient.
“For employees, happiness comes from the feeling of progress and momentum, both in their company and in their own career trajectories.”
– Dr. Jennifer Aaker, THE BUSINESS CASE FOR HAPPINESS, Stanford Graduate School of Business M345
According to Jeff Rumberg at Metric Net, “Agent Job Satisfaction is a bellwether metric that impacts many other metrics in service and support. It is positively correlated with customer satisfaction and negatively associated with absenteeism and turnover, meaning that absenteeism and turnover go down as agent job satisfaction goes up.”
Read more of Jeff’s research on Employee Engagement in the Contact Center: Metrics and Drivers.
How We Can Help
We realize that pulling in these data points and calculations manually is often hours of additional work for your contact center managers. So we created the Agent Balanced Scorecard in Brightmetrics™, a leader in contact center analytics.
“When it came to building and managing a balanced scorecard, what had previously taken several hours a week of manual work in an Excel spreadsheet is now automated within Brightmetrics.”
– Henry Svendblad, CTO Company Nurse
With customized options from Brightmetrics Agent Balanced Scorecard, available in early access for our CCaaS Analytics™ for Genesys Cloud, you can set clear and quantifiable agent performance standards which will lead to efficient contact center operations, saving you thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars returned to your bottom line.
