In a world where customers expect more from brands and businesses increasingly view customer experience (CX) as a key area of competition, contact centers play a crucial role in ensuring that customer satisfaction and loyalty drive long-term success.
So, effective contact center performance management is key to achieving desired business outcomes, enhancing CX, and unlocking operational efficiencies. But as the volume of customer interactions continues rising and the performance gap among agents remains obstinately wide, contact center leaders may feel too bogged down by day-to-day demands to proactively manage agent performance.
To help, we’ll explore six highly actionable tips to help you boost your contact center performance management strategy.
1. Set clear, measurable goals
To up-level the performance of your contact center, agents should know which outcomes matter most and how their success will be measured. Key performance indicators (KPIs) such as average handle time (AHT), first call resolution (FCR), and customer satisfaction (CSAT) are common targets for many contact centers. In organizations that aim to turn their contact centers into profit-generation hubs, conversion rates or other sales-related metrics may be focal points.
In any case, the contact center’s goals should ideally align with larger business objectives. While this may seem obvious, only 12% of organizations say they do an excellent job of driving business value through performance management processes.
To ensure your contact center performance management efforts yield the greatest possible results, start by establishing and communicating goals.
2. Provide continuous training and development
Equipping agents with the tools they need to keep their skills sharp and up-to-date will prove vital in a thoughtful approach to performance management. This could include regular training sessions, workshops, or one-to-one coaching focused on both soft skills (like empathy or assuming the sale) and technical skills (such as using new software or handling specific objections).
Companies with comprehensive training programs see 218% higher income per employee and a 24% higher profit margin than their counterparts without training processes in place. Not to mention, agent ramp time can be decreased significantly with a robust training and development program, enabling every agent to achieve optimal performance faster.
3. Implement real-time performance monitoring
It’s no secret that outdated quality management (QM) methods like call sampling are time-consuming and largely ineffective. Too often, agents have been coached on conversations that happened days or weeks in the past, making it difficult to accurately recall the interaction.
Utilizing real-time performance monitoring tools allows managers to track agent performance as it happens without requiring extra manual work. This enables immediate feedback and coaching, driving significant improvements in agent performance and customer satisfaction. Real-time dashboards and analytics can provide insights into key metrics and help identify areas for improvement on both an individual and team level.
4. Leverage advanced, AI-driven analytics
Contact centers generate large swaths of data, but few businesses have unlocked its full potential. Advanced analytics and AI technologies can provide deeper insights into agent performance and customer interactions, helping to identify patterns and trends that might be missed by human managers and offering a more comprehensive view of performance.
Building AI-driven insights into your contact center performance management strategy ensures you’re focused on the agent behaviors that drive outcomes and align with your goals. It enables the collation and implementation of customer feedback, allows you to uncover and address widespread performance issues immediately, and ensures the contact center’s goals are tracking toward business objectives.
5. Prioritize employee experience
Though employee experience is overlooked in many contact center performance management plans, creating a positive and supportive work environment can significantly impact agent performance. In fact, highly engaged teams see 81% lower absenteeism and a 14% bump in productivity over their less engaged counterparts. Simply put, happy agents are better at their jobs.
So, how can you ensure you’ve addressed employee experience in your performance management strategy? Provide personalized coaching to ensure they feel supported and empowered to excel, implement gamification elements to engage them in their daily work, and invest in tools to offload the rote tasks that drive burnout.
6. Put coaching and feedback processes on autopilot
In most contact centers, managers struggle to provide constructive, personalized feedback to every individual agent. But given that employees who receive regular feedback are nearly 15% less likely to leave their jobs and are over 12% more productive than those who receive no feedback, it’s clear there’s immense value in incorporating a regular feedback loop into contact center performance management.
Since the limitations of human bandwidth can’t scale, generative AI solutions are an ideal alternative for providing agents with the coaching and performance insights they crave. With a tailored, user-friendly solution, agents can track their progress toward goals, receive AI-driven coaching in the moment, and receive consistent, valuable feedback on their performance.
A holistic approach to performance management
Effective contact center agent performance management is a multifaceted process that involves clear goal setting, continuous training, real-time monitoring, advanced analytics, positive work environments, and consistent feedback. By adopting these best practices, organizations can maximize their contact center results, enhance customer satisfaction, and achieve operational excellence.
While deploying these strategies in parallel can effectively support performance management, leveraging a generative AI platform specifically designed for contact centers enables you to address every element of a well-rounded performance management strategy through a single solution. With real-time agent assistance, advanced analytics, comprehensive QM, and personalized coaching capabilities, the right generative AI platform makes cutting-edge contact center performance management effortless.
To learn more about how a generative AI solution purpose-built for contact centers can accelerate the impact of your performance management strategy, get in touch with Cresta today.
