59% Fail to Measure Agent Performance

59% of businesses cannot produce reports that measure agent, contact centre, sales and support team performance.

According to a new survey from Enghouse Interactive, a further 63% said their business could not accurately forecast call volumes, while the same percentage stated they could not use flexible scheduling processes.

The survey polled the views of more than 200 senior employees in UK organisations and revealed that many businesses are struggling to define quality customer service delivery. Due to cost and integration challenges, they are also failing to implement the necessary recording, monitoring and analytics tools to deliver it.

This lack of capability extends to companies’ current approaches to call monitoring and evaluation. Just 35% of businesses said they ‘can both monitor and evaluate the performance of our customer service agents on calls and also have structured processes in place to capture customer feedback on individual calls.’

Being able to effectively monitor and measure also requires visibility across customers, channels, systems and internal customer-facing operations, but organisations faced additional challenges here also.

Cost was the big issue, highlighted by 45% of respondents as a barrier, closely followed by integration of different technological systems (39%), and the related alignment of different systems, people and processes within the business (35%).

The quality challenge is made tougher by a lack of consensus about what the term actually means. 42% of respondents say quality service delivery in the contact centre is about ‘delivering effortless customer service to the greatest possible number of customers’, while 41% argue it’s about ‘achieving high levels of first call resolution or first contact resolution.’

A surprisingly high number of businesses seem to be stuck in the past. 37% of respondents highlighted the ‘ability to drive down average handle time and answer calls more quickly’ as key to delivering quality service. It is perhaps more of a concern that 9% claim not to have any understanding of what it means at all.

“These figures should be a source of serious concern for UK businesses and the customers they service,” said Jeremy Payne, International VP, Marketing at Enghouse Interactive. “After all, as the old adage has it, you can’t manage what you don’t measure. Businesses will inevitably struggle to deliver the high-quality, highly effective service offerings their customers are looking for if they are not able to measure the results they are getting.”

Click here to download the full survey findings from Enghouse Interactive