Increasing Productivity in Call Centers with User Behavior Monitoring
Like with any other business, keeping performance and productivity up to speed is necessary to the success of the call center and the business it serves. Quality assurance software provides call centers with a means to gauge service standards but fails to provide insights on how and where agent productivity and performance can be improved. By increasing productivity in call centers, customer satisfaction is always increased. Call centers, therefore, have been turning to user behavior monitoring to gather the productivity insights to inform and improve agent performance.
Two key uses of behavior monitoring specifically related to increasing productivity in call centers have emerged from this trend: skill identification and performance improvement planning.
Identifying Agent Soft Skills with User Behavior Monitoring
Knowing customer satisfaction was equally as important as productivity, a remote inbound and outbound call center looking to optimize the performance of their customer agents needed a way to analyze the work of their remote teams. To do so, the call center deployed a user behavior monitoring software on their agents’ work stations.
The user behavior software was set up to monitor service calls and chats, as well as collect data on how their agents’ time was being spent. Through screen and call recording, keystroke logging and application time tracking, the user behavior software collected data points for each agent and provided a breakdown of agent performance. Then, using this data, management was able to further investigate and identify each agent’s unique service behavior.
After six weeks of data collection and analysis, management recognized a trend in their customer care agents. Their agents tended to fall into three distinct service categories: technically driven agents, sympathetic agents and demonstrative agents. Having a varied workforce with differing soft skills was a plus for the call center, but as the data revealed, the way the agents were being utilized wasn’t optimal.
Tapping and playing into the soft skills of any employee can have a huge impact on employee productivity and a company’s success. In LinkedIn’s Global Talent Trends Report, 80% of respondents say soft skills are increasingly important to the success of a company while recruiters say undeveloped soft skills are the reason a new hire doesn’t work out 89% of the time.
The call center saw these stats come to life firsthand. Agents who were technically driven and excelled at troubleshooting customers’ product issues were losing time satisfying their outbound call quota while the exact opposite was happening with the call center’s more sympathetic agents. These agents were struggling to get through servicing customers that needed assistance with mechanical and engineering issues but thrived when settling customer complaints. Adversely, demonstrative agents were overperforming in outbound servicing but getting hung up on other types of call center tasks.
The discovery of the agents’ soft skills and the part they played in assisting customers inspired management to make a change in order to increase productivity in the call center. Rather than having operators responsible for any and all tasks, management enacted a skill-based routing system that assigned calls to agents based on their area of expertise.
Productivity soared.
After making changes based on the data collected by the user behavior monitoring system, the amount of serviced customers per agent increased resulting in the call center’s highest performing month on record. Other call center metrics saw improvement too. Outbound surveys and response calls were more successful. This allowed the center to gather key information on customer sentiment to help steer their services.
Performance Improvement Planning with User Behavior Monitoring
At another call center, existing quality assurance software revealed the center’s overall performance heavily relied on the output of a small group of employees. While the software in place showed these agents were able to answer more calls, had shorter average handling time (AHT) and better first call resolution rates, it provided no further insights into agent performance. To get to the bottom of this, the call center deployed a user behavior monitoring software to find out what was going on behind the scenes.
The user behavior monitoring software showed how agents were working and allowed management to identify key differences between the workflow of high performing employees and low performing employees. Through the software’s employee dashboard, managers saw employees’ time spent in individual apps both related and unrelated to work, employee idle time and their communication methods. Then, using the screen recordings captured by the user behavior monitoring, administrators were able to further investigate agent workflow, identifying individual work processes.
To the surprise of the management, idle time and non-work related activities weren’t the culprit causing the productivity gap between high performing and low performing employees. Instead, the gap in performance was being caused by app usage and app fluency.
Although this was a shock for managers, research shows this is a common problem among today’s workforce. On average, employees use 13 separate applications per day, switching between them about 30 times, leading to 26% of the workforce operating inefficiently.
The managers at the call center found that high performing employees were using shortcuts and workarounds to bypass unnecessary steps to more quickly service customers, while low performing employees were spending an excess amount of time navigating the service apps.
Armed with this information, management set out to create performance improvement plans for low performing employees. The user behavior monitoring results came in handy again. Referencing the workflows of high performing agents, managers came up with optimized workflows for the lower performing employees to mimic and created training sessions that aimed to ease employee app usage.
The call center’s overall productivity improved almost instantly.
By installing user behavior monitoring, managers were able to tap into what was working for their employees and what wasn’t and help their lower performers work better and more efficiently. The benefits for the call center were two fold: performance and productivity increased while the business was saved from going through the costly process of recruiting new agents to replace their low performers.
Conclusion
Although monitoring isn’t new to call centers, the traditional quality monitoring software used by call centers lacks the performance data needed to improve productivity. Supplementing quality assurance software with user behavior monitoring solves this information void by providing granular insights into agent workflows. Increasing productivity in call centers with user behavior monitoring can be achieved in more ways than one. Collected employee data can be analyzed again and again to continuously improve performance, allowing call centers, their customers and the companies they serve to thrive.
Harness Data & Analytics With Teramind
Empowering your team to be more focused, decisive and productive is no easy task. Managers and team leads need clear metrics to manage their teams efficiently, but all of the data can be overwhelming. Teramind fills the missing gap in existing employee monitoring solutions by translating raw tracking data into meaningful metrics that can help you make data-driven decisions.
But don’t just take our word for it…
