Relevantie Auditio: interessant in het kader van het Auditio topagents project…
Auteur: Ashu Roy, eGain, Published in CCF, July 2007
No matter what kind of operation you run, there is always that one star agent who seems to have a magical rapport with customers and who consistently gets results for the business. If only all of your agents could be like that.
Well, perhaps they can — if you know how to get the best out of them:
1. Hire attitude and coach aptitude
Do your utmost to hire the right people. The one key rule is: “attitudes are hard to change, aptitude can be built up over time”.
2. Identify your best agents
Don’t base the judgement of who is performing the best purely on efficiency-centric metrics. Instead, adopt balanced scorecard models to measure attributes across efficiency, effectiveness and loyalty.
3. Deploy your agents according to their strengths
Rather than merely identifying overall high-performers among your agents, take the time to ascertain key strengths and weaknesses of all your agents. For instance, some agents may be good listeners and empathise well. Others may be better at problem solving.
4. Learn from and leverage your best agents
With the best agents now identified, the next step is to ascertain what it is they do that is different from the average agent. Data on their approaches to a range of key customer service enquiries should be captured, then aggregated and analysed to highlight the most appropriate customer service approach based on real life situations.
5. Migrate knowledge from classroom training to in-process delivery
Over and above classroom-based training, a sustainable solution is to adopt a sound knowledge management strategy. Top-performing agents should be approached as authors to populate the business intelligence system.
6. Shift quality measurement from post-process to in-process analytics
Most contact centres measure quality by recording and monitoring conversations. Agent performance can be assessed more effectively by monitoring their traversal through the knowledge management system. By understanding the routes they have taken to get to the right information, you’ll see patterns of performance.
7. Institute six-sigma practice
Make sure you capture best-practice solutions in a knowledge management system and
monitor performance in live scenarios. This type of measurement, when mapped against preferred processes, provides the agent with rapid feedback and quickly alters behaviour and activity.
8. Create a “tournament effect”
Healthy competition through transparent ranking and recognition creates a strong tournament effect, which pushes the average agent to dig deeper and perform better.
9. Instill job satisfaction through job enrichment and rotation
Contact centres often lose sight of the fact that agents want a richer job experience. Role enrichment can help prevent burnout. When agents get the opportunity to do more or do something different, they feel empowered and cared for and improved performance follows.
10. Leverage know-how and technology to improve the overall customer experience
Not every interaction needs to rely on the live performance of the agent. A well-populated knowledge bank, authored by your best agents, can further drive efficiencies.
Leave a reply