19.12.2019

How to Improve the Performance of Contact Center Agents

How to Improve Contact Center Agents’ Performance, Boost Productivity and Optimize Processes.

How to Improve the Performance of Contact Center Agents

The call center agent’s work can often be monotonous and repetitive, but there are many ways to enhance their performance. Throughout the working day, agents have to handle a constant flow of incoming calls or dial numbers of cold and warm clients. Importantly, agents must effectively consult potential and existing customers, providing them with comprehensive and intelligible information about a product or service. In outsourcing call centers, agents work with several projects simultaneously, which may not necessarily relate to one another. However, even under such conditions, agents should be uniquely capable of representing every company and every product. For improving the quality of work, you can use practical methods, such as the introduction of more functional software for the contact center. But before choosing a new program, it’s essential to determine the information load on the agent. The load is assessed when analyzing both outgoing and incoming calls. Next, we will look at six ways to improve agent performance at the Oki-Toki service for internal and outsourcing call centers.

Optimizing Agent Performance

 

1. Utilizing Scripts for Conversations

1. If your employee is new, they may not always know the right answers, and mistakes can be made. This negatively impacts sales and customer loyalty. The solution — embedding a conversation script into your CRM. This ensures that even an agent taking their first call knows what to say! Critical information to ask the client and inform them about will be displayed in a special dialog box. This script helps make the conversation shorter and more meaningful. It boosts employee confidence, lets them hold the conversation more calmly and avoid errors. For a comprehensive understanding of scripts for contact center agents, feel free to delve into our article.

 

2. Automatic dialing for outbound calls

How is the performance of a contact center agent enhanced by dialer? If your business relies on outbound calls, the efficiency of an agent can be boosted with the implementation of dialer. Contact center staff will no longer manually dial numbers and listen to ringtones. Dialer frees up individuals from mundane operations because even simple number dialing takes 5-7 seconds, while awaiting a response takes up about 20-30 seconds. Outbound calls are made according to schedule, based on a pre-prepared database, hence, the tasks of selecting a phone number and dialing it can be handed over to the dialer feature. The specialist saves their time and energy for productive actions. Read more about Oki-Toki dialer here.

3. Automated distribution of inbound calls

Thanks to this feature, agents don’t need to compete with each other for receiving calls. The system automatically distributes incoming calls according to the scripts implanted in the software. Depending on the settings, the distribution can consider agent qualifications, workload or follow data from your CRM.

4. Automatic status switching

This approach to agent workflow management involves assignment of different statuses: dialing (making a call), busy (in conversation), PCP (post-call processing), free (ready to answer calls), and non-available.

The ‘Non-available’ status is assigned by the agent himself before temporarily leaving the workspace. Furthermore, this status can also be assigned by the system if the agent misses a call.

This approach ensures the load is evenly distributed amongst the team members, and agents who have just finished a call get a break before the next one, necessary for logging the information into the database.

Read more about the agents’ statuses in our article.

5. Integration of CRM and Reference Information

Integrating a CRM with all the client’s information and their orders simplifies the specialist’s work. If you integrate the database with the cloud-based Oki-Toki software, the system will be able to automatically dial the client’s number.

CRM allows agents to work swiftly and competently. Thanks to the database, employees receive all the key information in a timely manner. The benefits of using it include:

  • Storing call data and telephone numbers;
  • Monitoring information, comparing data;
  • Storing data about all the company’s customers and their queries.

CRM helps process all the vital information and remember the necessary data volume accurately.

6. The ability to track the quality of your work (KPI)

Motivating contact center agents is an essential precondition for high-quality customer service. To determine the size of bonuses or piece-rate salaries, workers are assigned KPIs – key performance indicators toward which the agent should strive. Among these indicators can be:

  • The number of sales;
  • The number of rejections;
  • The average call duration;
  • The hold time on the line;
  • Breathers in work.

The cloud software Oki-Toki allows each agent to track his KPI at any moment. Read more about KPI in our article.

Oki-Toki will help you improve your agents’ performance

? ??Optimizing an agent’s work is a necessary step in any contact center. This results in increased profits, liberation from monotonous or excessive work, and focuses only on what is truly important.

??Tools: dialer, voice broadcasting, voice robots, conversation scripts or scripts – these are the first steps to improving agent operations. Try ready-to-use tools to enhance agent performance in the Oki-Toki cloud service and see their effectiveness for yourself!

??Need some time to think? Our offer is “Make decisions after using all the features!”. Request 14 days of full access and be sure that the tools work!

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