Any consumer-facing business needs a motivated and high-performance workforce to stay focused on the assigned tasks. It is the responsibility of the senior management to ensure that the consumer-facing staff is provided with the required resources and knowledge to make decisions that are right for the business and the consumer. The challenge for employees is to do it consistently.
This is especially true for call-center operations. Typically, performance is measured in a call center every month. In some cases, it is difficult for senior management to manage a performance level that continues to drive growth and profitability. Be it in sales, after-sales, or support processes, a high customer satisfaction score in a call center is directly related to the growth of the business.
The ability to manage workplace productivity consistently is a key challenge for call-center executives. Several employee performance monitoring tools can help you increase workplace productivity.
Here are the top 5 keys to improving employee performance:
1. Focus on soft skills
One of the best things that you can do to improve employee performance is to focus on the soft skills of the employees that are performing well month over month. Quality assurance software can only tell you about the level of service that is being provided to the customers and whether it is in line with the set processes.
However, you would have to rely on other employee monitoring software for remote teams to segment your workforce based on their soft skills. You may be running many inbound and outbound processes, and employees would also have different soft skills compared to each other.
Employees can either be technical, sympathetic, or demonstrative in their approach. It has been seen that the technical agents are good at handling troubleshooting complaints of the consumer. Similarly, sympathetic ones would be good at resolving consumer complaints. The employees with demonstrative soft skills are typically more comfortable with outbound processes but struggle with other call-center tasks.
You need to identify the soft skills pattern for each employee by looking at service calls and chats and analyzing how the time of agents is being spent once they log in. The employee performance monitoring tools would help you identify the soft skills for each employee, and you can use a skill-based call routing mechanism to ensure that the right call is routed to the right employee.
2. Look for the right solutions
Another way to improve employee performance in a call center is to identify the right solutions. One of the best learnings employees can get is by learning from the experience of their colleagues. As call-center employees are working in a similar environment, they would be able to appreciate the right solutions that are being followed by their colleagues. Once your employees notice that their colleagues are doing something right that is getting them good results, you would be better positioned to operationalize the change much faster.
The challenge here is to identify the right solutions. This is even tougher in a hybrid work ecosystem. You can use employee performance monitoring tools to analyze the right steps that are being taken by high-performing employees and share those learnings with the rest.
This is the best possible way in which you can help employees to speed up their learning curve and transform from being a low-performing employee to a high-performing ninja. This would even protect against the cost of hiring new staff to replace the low-performing employees.
Employee performance monitoring tools can help you do the right things that are being implemented by your best employees, and then those can be implemented across the organization for productivity improvement.
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3. Relook at performance evaluation
There is a need to relook at the key performance indicators (KPIs) of the workforce. As most call centers have moved or are expected to move to a hybrid ecosystem, it is the need of the hour to align your KPIs with the end objective of the business.
For instance, if your objective is to keep the customer satisfaction score (CSAT) high, but you are constantly tracking average handling time, it is time to make a change. As you push your employees to keep the average handling time short, there would be some employees that would just rush through the call. It may not even impact the CSAT score but would also impact the first contact resolution (FCR).
You need to identify the metrics that are well-suited for your end-objective and then track them efficiently to move the needle. One of the most important tasks in this journey is to effectively communicate these metrics to your employees. As you can only manage what you understand, it is critical to help the employees understand the parameters on which their performance would be judged.
Once employees have a clear understanding of this framework, they can expect workplace productivity to go up as the metrics being tracked are aligned with the objectives of the business.
4. Promote healthy competition
Human beings, by nature, love competitions. One of the best ways for productivity improvement is to promote healthy competition in the team.
You can create different teams and advisors in the company, and then ask the two teams to work on similar projects for a short time. These short-sprint competitions keep things exciting and playful for the team. At the same time, the learning employees get by closely working with each other helps them improve their productivity levels significantly.
You can use employee performance monitoring tools to set up a framework to keep employees aware of the performance of their team members and the competing team to keep them on their toes.
Such short-sprint competitions can be organized regularly to let the best teams compete for the grand prize. Another good way to boost employee productivity is by recognizing the excellent work done by the winning team.
5. Provide the required resources
Another way to boost employee productivity in a call-center ecosystem is by providing the employees with the resources that will help them work more efficiently. In a hybrid work ecosystem, the requirements are drastically different from the traditional setup. You can start with analyzing the challenges that are being faced by employees, and then look for solutions that can help them overcome these hurdles.
Once you have provided the employees with the resources that will help them work more efficiently, you can expect the productivity levels to go up. These resources can mean technical solutions, policy changes, or any other change that will help employees to work more efficiently.
You can use employee performance monitoring tools to figure out the challenges that are being faced by employees and then identify the solutions that will provide a better ecosystem.
The last word
These 5 ways can help you take the initial steps towards improving employee productivity. These steps may each take a varied amount of time to apprehend and implement. The degree of improvement would also depend on your current state and your desired state.
Keeping these variables in mind, you can start on the journey to implement these changes and notice the improvement in the performance levels for yourself.
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