Using Technology to Optimise Agent Performance

Recently, it struck me that – despite our industry’s ongoing evolution towards AI, machine learning and automation – it’s still people that account for around 70% of contact centre expenditure.

So, while it’s critical to take full advantage of next-generation technologies in order to deliver excellent customer experiences, it’s equally important for CX teams to focus on doing everything they can to optimise the performance of their contact centre agents.

That’s why there’s now so much focus on performance management as a vehicle for managing agent performance and productivity.

Of course, existing workforce optimisation disciplines such as workforce management, quality monitoring and speech analytics are still important, but it’s increasingly the performance management function that tracks and drives overall contact centre delivery against an organisation’s key customer engagement KPIs.

This makes sense given the critical role that service and personalisation play in delivering a high-quality customer experience.

A recent global survey – involving over 36,000 consumers across 18 countries – indicated that more than three out of four customers want human contact to remain part of the customer service equation, so how organisations fine-tune their mix of digital and human engagement options to deliver scalable customer service excellence is critical.

Clearly, managing performance and productivity is getting more complex, particularly given the multiple functions, disparate systems and complex processes of today’s extended customer journeys.

However, by adopting a continuous-loop data-driven process, you can start measuring your performance against KPIs – and adjust accordingly to correct based on the actionable insights you draw from your other workforce optimisation applications.

While performance management makes a lot of sense, it can be challenging for many organisations simply because of the difficulty of collecting and integrating data from a range of different contact centre and back-office systems.

However, that’s not the case with a performance management solution as it is an integral module within the broader workforce optimisation suite, making it much simpler to capture and aggregate data across multiple systems.

Perhaps more importantly, effective performance management can also help free your customer engagement managers from time-consuming manual reporting – freeing them up to focus on more beneficial coaching activities, particularly as the solution links directly to feature such as eLearning management and focused coaching.