Your contact center agents carry the huge responsibility of representing your business and your brand. Not only are they at the front lines of handling customer questions, requests, and problems, but how they conduct themselves directly impacts the customer experience. That impression can determine whether callers remain loyal customers, or take their business elsewhere. That’s why many companies continually search for ways to improve call center agent performance.
One way to do this is through manual call monitoring. But manually listening to each conversation for every agent is time-consuming and doesn’t provide accurate results. Fortunately, an automated call monitoring solution using speech analytics technology can make the process far more efficient. Added features, such as call transcriptions and emotion analysis, can help improve call center agent performance in the following ways:
1. Tell Agents What to Say to Customers
This seems easy enough, but managers often don’t know where to start with this one. Call transcriptions provide concrete evidence for the best way to handle almost any situation with a customer. Whether it’s defusing a tense situation, proposing an upsell opportunity, or other circumstances, managers can easily find real-life examples of successful calls using call transcriptions.
Managers can use these examples during training or as part of a script. This is a quick, easy, and concrete way to provide agents with things to say that are proven to work with customers. Agents can then approach each conversation with confidence and better assist the customer.
2. Use Scripts to Ensure Compliance
Scripts are very helpful in assisting agents with callers, but they are also a necessity for regulated industries. What agents say or don’t say can have severe penalties, so they must adhere to the script at all times. Managers can search call transcriptions for keywords that uncover conversations in which agents were not compliant. Agents can plainly see where they were not compliant, and managers can encourage them to be more conscious in the future.
3. Help Agents Understand Their Customers
Another way transcriptions can be useful is providing a way for agents to understand the voice of their customers. This is mostly done through sentiment analysis, which quantifies the mood of a conversation. When agents learn how to use this tool to understand their customers, they can formulate better strategies for future calls. And this benefit is enhanced when transcripts are available in additional languages, such as Spanish, so agents can aid even more customers.
4. Teach Agents How to Monitor Their Tone
Agents may not be aware of how they sound to callers. This is especially true when dealing with a difficult customer. While some agents think they sound calm, their tone tells another story. And when agents sound tense, the customer will be more tense. Sentiment analysis is also useful here because it can detect changes in the agents’ demeanor during a conversation. When agents see this change represented with a visual aid, they will know how to better resolve such occurrences in a calm and professional manner.
5. Improve Agent Morale
To improve call center agent performance, you must improve agent morale. It’s that simple; however, many contact center managers forget this. In addition to correcting mistakes, automated scoring and searchable transcriptions can be used to identify agents’ strengths and areas that need improvement. This information can be used to praise agents to recognize their efforts, which will have a positive effect on their motivation and job performance.
Automated quality monitoring (AQM) can have a tremendous impact on agent performance. Better performance means a better customer experience. When agents perform well, callers are happier and are more likely to return and tell others about their positive experience. With AQM, everybody wins.
