How Can Contact Center Analytics Help Agents Improve Performance?

As any contact center knows, time (or, more accurately, “handle time,”) is money. In fact, TechTarget notes that average handle time (AHT), most often measured from the customer’s initiation of the call and including any hold time, talk time, and related tasks, is a key factor in deciding call center staffing levels.

But how can supervisors and quality analysts monitor in-progress calls to determine which agents are performing well versus those who may need additional coaching? Enter contact center analytics, which evaluates agent performance in real time, identifies cost reduction and optimization opportunities (i.e., AHT reduction), and ultimately increases sales through effective performance management.

Here’s a look at a handful of ways contact center analytics can help agents improve performance:

Identify Coaching & Training Opportunities

With customer expectations on the rise, it’s becoming increasingly important for call centers to provide exceptional customer experiences. Research shows the majority of customers (86%) quit doing business with a company because of a bad customer experience, up more than 20% from four years earlier.

Contact center analytics automate the performance management process by providing direct call center performance feedback to managers, supervisors, and agents. Because even the most skilled agents need encouragement and support, managers can leverage this feedback to grow and manage agent team by offering ongoing training opportunities.

Empower Agents with Actionable Information

Omer Minkara, Research Director at Aberdeen Group, says the real value of contact center analytics comes from agents’ ability to uses these insights in “the moment of truth” – when they need to serve their customers. “[Contact centers] need to empower agents with all the information on their desktop to see what the customer said about the brand pre- and post-interaction,” he says in a Data Informed article.

Act, not react is a good way of thinking about proactively using contact center analytics insights. With EurekaLive, CallMiner’s automated real-time quality monitoring solution, supervisors can drill into any call and intervene when/if necessary, resulting in immediate and direct agent coaching and improvement.

Mitigate Risk & Compliance Issues

Another benefit of EurekaLive is the ability it gives managers and supervisors to monitor in-progress calls for the presence or absence of specific language or acoustic characteristics. This is especially important in collections environments, where maintaining compliance is critical for staying within state and federal licensing laws.

Speech analytics solutions for collections eliminate compliance risk by tracking every call for Mini Miranda language, Right Party Contact language, FDCPA violations, abusive language from either party, and other risky language. As a result of scoring 100% of calls, managers and supervisors can identify specific factors contributing to negative performance trends and work with agents to emphasize behaviors and activities that lead to successful collections.

Final Thoughts

Today’s marketplace is undergoing a significant transformation that’s putting the consumer in the driver’s seat and forcing companies to rethink how they can provide the types of experiences that will satisfy and retain customers. The above represents just a few of the ways contact center analytics can lead to improved agent performance, which ultimately results in an improved customer experience.