How to Measure & Improve Call Center Employee Productivity

An estimated $41 billion is lost by U.S. companies alone each year due to poor customer service. There is no doubt that productivity is a critical factor in boosting your call center's growth. Your agents will be more productive the more productive they are, which in turn will result in higher revenue for your organization.

Several factors can influence the productivity of employees in a call center, but you don't have to worry about that when measuring employee productivity rates. There are lots of dynamic employee monitoring software like TrackOlap that help ma nagers keep track of employees’ productivity and assign tasks.

Let's take a closer look at how you can measure it effectively as well as five effective tips to help you improve agent productivity. Let's begin this blog by defining what call center productivity is and highlighting key numbers that you can use as metrics.

How to Measure Call Center Performance?

Taking a look at how your employee's work doesn't automatically give you an idea of how productive they are, does it? When it comes to determining the efficiency of your agents when dealing with customer calls, you need productivity measurement tactics that will help you achieve that goal.

To measure productivity within a call center, managers and business owners often use performance metrics, such as those found in Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), which show how productive their call center employees are.

Let’s take a look at some metrics designed specifically for measuring the productivity of call center agents and how they can be improved.

1. Application abandonment rate

Several factors can cause customers to abandon a call, including long hold times, high abandonment rates, and customers who hang up before reaching an agent because of the long hold time. The abandonment rate is expressed as a percentage of the total number of inbound calls.

When your agent’s abandon rate is low, it indicates that they are productive and are handling a high number of inbound or incoming calls at the same time.

2) The first call resolution rate

As a key performance indicator, this KPI shows how many customers were able to resolve their issues on their first call.

In addition to being productive, your employees will be able to help your customers resolve their problems without needing to communicate more than once with you if your first call resolution rate is high.

3. Average Time in Queue

A customer's average time in a queue measures the total amount of time it takes them to get hold of one of your customer service representatives to get a call back from them.

Keeping customers happy is always a good thing, but if there is a long wait time, they are more likely to have an unpleasant customer experience. Shorter wait times indicate that your agents are working more efficiently, which results in happier customers.

4. The average amount of handling time

A call center's average handling time describes the amount of time an agent spends on customer interaction-related tasks when they are working in a call center.

The average handle time for a call is calculated by taking the after-call talk time and dividing it by the number of calls placed

Essentially, the Average Handling Time (AHT) is the sum of the Average Call Duration (ACD) and the average time spent on post-call tasks.

5. Measure customer satisfaction

As a result of their interactions with an agent, customers usually generate a Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) via a rating scale which is then added to their CSAT score.

To evaluate whether the customers are satisfied with their call center agent, the call center asks them to rate their satisfaction on a scale of 1 to 5 or on a similar scale that ranges from "highly dissatisfied" to "highly satisfied".

6. Choose the amount and level of service you want

A KPI indicates whether a given percentage of calls are answered within the given time threshold. This is known as the service level.

According to most call centers, the goal is to achieve an 80/20 service level - which means that the contact center wants to be able to answer 80% of calls within 20 seconds - which is the goal most call centers strive to achieve.

7. Speed of reply

Taking the overall wait time divided by the total number of calls, we can get an average speed of answer

It is unlikely that you have ever encountered a situation in which you had to wait for an agent to answer your call for hours on end.

There is an essential tool you can use in measuring your Average Speed of Answer because it can tell you how long it takes for a customer to talk to an agent. The longer the wait time for an agent is, the worse the customer's perception of your call center is going to be.

8. The percentage of callers that hang up after waiting in the line

Taking the number of blocked calls and multiplying it by 100, we can get a percentage of blocked calls. A good way to gauge how many of your customers are getting busy tones when they attempt to contact your call center is by looking at the blocked call percentage.

9. How full a place is

To calculate the occupancy rate, multiply the total handle time by the total available time by 100. This does not mean that an agent is making live calls every minute, but it does mean that they were dealing with live calls for 70% of the time that they were available to deal with them.

For example, if an agent's occupancy rate is at 80%, that means that they are dealing with live calls for 80% of the time they are available. Your occupancy rate will be low if your agents don't work the majority of the time if there is a low occupancy rate.

10. Rate per call

There is a formula that divides the business's total operating expenses and labor costs by the number of calls it receives

It shows how much your company spends per call, excluding all operational expenditures, such as rent, utility bills, and other overhead expenses, to determine the performance of your employees in the call center.

A low cost per call, on the other hand, is a sign of high worker productivity, a low labor cost, and an agent who can easily turn a profit for their company because of low labor costs.

What Are the Ways to Boost Your Call Centre's Efficiency?

To improve your agent's productivity, here are five tips that will help you:

1. Using metrics as your tools

Your call center agent's productivity can be measured in many ways, namely with a number of KPIs that are available to you.

As we mentioned above, you can use some metrics for measuring the productivity of your call center, such as the ones we have mentioned in the previous paragraphs. You can also deploy a free tracking software to analyze their productivity on an analytical dashboard.

As a result, when using these call center metrics, ensure that you only use them as a means of providing constructive feedback to the agents who are handling your calls.

If you use the KPIs to compare your high-performing agents with those who struggle to perform, you're going to put your already unproductive agents at risk of losing motivation and increasing turnover.

To improve employee performance in your contact center, use the contact center metrics to devise ways to improve them.

This will be a great way to help boost the overall performance of the call center if your high performers share their routines and experiences with those who are struggling.

2. Teaching the agents to switch between channels

In recent years, the traditional setting of a call center has taken a back seat in the world.

It is now popular to have an omnichannel contact center instead of a traditional call center, and this trend is expected to continue.

You need to offer the best possible customer service for your business to stay on top of the competition. That means providing support on any channel that is convenient for your customers for you to make sure you remain competitive.

For your customer support team to be successful, you need to ensure that they are well-versed not only on the phone but also on platforms such as email, instant messaging, social media, and web chat.

You run the risk of losing a customer if you don't offer the means that they prefer to communicate with you, and they'll go to a business that makes their lives easier if you do not.

By training your employees as multichannel agents, you will be able to improve the level of service and quality that you provide to your customers by being able to interact more effectively with them.

3. Focusing only on delivering the best service

It is common to focus on increasing the number of incoming and outbound calls that your call center is handling when running a call center.

It is important, however, to ensure that your agents do not focus on just how many calls they make, but on how much quality they can provide to your customers, as this can result in the customer feeling frustrated.

If you can't provide quality customer service to any one of your thousands of calls, then what's the point of handling thousands of them?

Using customer satisfaction surveys to measure the quality of each of your agents, following up with customers through a CRM lead management app, and then providing training on an as-needed basis to keep your agent quality level high, is a great way for you to increase productivity while maintaining or improving your customer call quality.

4. Find a way to motivate your employees

Having your hard work recognized is something that every individual wants, isn't it?

As a manager, not only do you boost employee satisfaction when you reward an employee for a job well done, but you are also sending a message to other employees that they can also be rewarded if they are performing well as well.

Your business will benefit greatly from these gestures, as they will create an environment that encourages a culture of healthy competition within your workplace.

The rewards you give to your top performers will also motivate them to get more involved in personal development to be able to provide your business with the best value.

5. Picking out the best software

If you try to manage everything manually, there is a good chance that a lot of things will go wrong since running a call center is not an easy task.

Call Center monitoring software is first and foremost one of the most essential parts of the process of running a call center.

To help you find the best tool for your needs, here are some suggestions:

● Manage incoming phone calls and route them to the available call center or customer service reps.

● Offer automated services, such as voice response, interactive menus, and speech recognition.

● Place outgoing calls and connect to customers when a live person answers.

● A database of articles, videos, and FAQs that answer common questions.

● Analyze recordings of phone conversations for trends and patterns.

There are also quality assurance and workforce management software programs that can be investe d in addition to the above. This is a good starting point, but it's not enough to manage your call center successfully.

There are hundreds of employee monitoring apps available to help employers maintain high engagement levels in their remote employees because most call centers are moving towards remote work.

Other tools can be used to easily manage your employee groups even if you don't manage remote agents.

There are several tools that you can use to help you with the following:

● Monitor what your employees are up to during working hours.

● See if they are being productive or wasting their time.

● Generate real-time reports on employee performance.

● Tracking their location and leaves

It is a great relief to know that TrackOlap is an all-in-one solution that can cover all of these requirements.

To measure the productivity of their employees, companies rely on TrackOlap as a Remote team management tool. This tool has been used b y large corporations as well as small and medium-sized businesses.

As a result, the following will be accomplished:

● Keep track of how much time is spent on each call.

● Track the working hours of all your remote and in-office employees.

● Generate real-time reports that show the performance of your workforce.

● Assist you in streamlining your employee payment processes.

● Work with a variety of business tools to free the clutter of lead pipes and follow-up customers.

There are also plenty of other Powerful features available in this powerful business automation app , including work schedules, distraction alerts, and screenshot support.

Wrapping up

It can seem like an extremely difficult task to monitor the productivity of call center agents regularly. There is no doubt that call centers are always on the go, receiving loads of calls from customers.

It won't take long for you to know exactly how productive each of your employees is if you use the correct productivity metrics and tools for measuring your employees' performance. As soon as you pair those metrics with the tips and tools we've discussed in this article, you're going to be able to dramatically increase the level of productivity in your workplace.