Reasons to Monitor and Motivate Contact Center Agents for the Long Haul

These days, many states are becoming a haven for contact centers. These centralized offices are used for receiving or transmitting a large volume of requests (by telephone, email, online chat, fax, or instant message) to help clients or answer inquiries. All customer contacts are managed at the center. Such a place hires agents or representatives to administer incoming product support requests or information inquiries from consumers.

Customer satisfaction is key to a business’ success, and that is why it is important for companies to stay on top of their CRM practices and focus their centers on customer happiness. Happy customers, in fact, are sure to remain loyal and might even refer other clients.

To make sure call centers deliver their best services, it is important for companies to implement good CRM practices to include training agents appropriately, motivating employees and analyzing customer feedback. 

The center’s agents are the pillars of the contact center activities, and it is important that they perform at their best even when receiving high volumes of inquiries. Their performance determines the success of the place and the overall quality of service offered by the company that has to fulfill customers' expectations and needs. This is the focus of an article posted recently on the Business 2 Community website, “Why You Should Monitor Your Call Center Agents.”

The post tells of the importance of monitoring “to make sure that the contact center and the contact center agents are operating efficiently and providing customers with an exceptional experience in order to see a return on this investment.” In order to do that, a supervisor, manager, boss or quality assurance specialist, could “extract data from the contact center – through conversations with customers and through workstations – in order to monitor and measure performance overall,” the post says. Either this can be done in real-time or through playing back a recording, for example, to understand the customer experience and capture the agent-customer call-handling process, acts, behaviors, or compliance with a given script.

Engaging in call center monitoring, tools like call recording, for instance, make it much easier to monitor call center agents and identify the top performers, says the post. Call recording technology, coupled with a call monitoring solution, may be a practical approach to analyzing the calls with customers, measure agent script compliance and check for quality assurance. One can gain a lot of data and see if the call center is on track by observing employees at work and/or observing the data contained in conversations. An efficient call recording and monitoring technology is essential to have in place to see what transpires from customers’ contacts and what else the center needs to assure it meets objectives.

However, in addition to carrying out recording, monitoring and analyzing calls to ensure customer service representatives are performing at their top, call centers also need to support and motivate their employees. It is important to recognize their efforts from time to time with words and gestures, recognition or even financial incentives; these are all good ways to keep them going and staying motivated.