Your customers don’t hesitate to share when they have a really good (or really bad) experience with your service team. While nearly 72% of customers share their good experiences with others, 13% of customers tell at least 15 people if they have a negative experience with a company. Think of the long-term implications! Your center’s performance can totally shift your reputation in the market. This makes call center performance management critical.

Call center performance management ensures your team executes at its best. With it, set (and hit) goals to deliver exceptional service and grow as a team.

What is Performance Management in a Call Center?

Call center performance management is like going to the doctor for a check-up. During the appointment, your doctor defines what’s healthy. What are safe blood sugar levels? What’s a good resting heart rate? These kinds of benchmarks keep you and your doctor on the same page and let you speak the same language throughout your visit.

Similarly, call center performance management gives your whole team a common language for what a healthy call center looks like. Performance management identifies where you need to improve your service using tools like metrics, scorecards, and surveys.

Let’s be honest, call center turnover rates and agent burnout rates can’t afford to get any higher. Performance management is about finding balance. It’s your chance to find tactics to engage agents and keep them happy in their work, which then ensures operations are smooth and customers are satisfied.  Let’s dig into how performance management helps you find that balance.

Want to learn more about call center metrics and KPIs? Check out our blog.

5 Ways to Measure Your Call Center Performance

1. Send Customer Satisfaction Surveys

It doesn’t matter how fast your service is, if customers are unhappy, it’s time to adjust your tactics. Your customers are the best source of intel into how you’re performing.

Custimer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys evaluate whether your customers are happy. They help you better understand the voice of your customers so that you can grow your company. A great way to practice customer-centric call center performance management is by automating surveys to send after each interaction.

2. Aim for High First Contact Resolution (FCR)

FCR is an important metric for call center performance management because it tracks the rate at which your customers’ questions or problems are resolved in a single interaction. Your FCR rates reveal a lot. When it’s low, your agents may need some extra training on your product. Or perhaps your routing processes may be wonky, or you might have unclear IVR options that lead customers to the wrong department.

But when FCR is high, your agents are empowered to answer customer questions promptly, your tech is doing its job, and your processes are working. The bottom line? Aim for a high FCR to boost performance.

3. Lower Your Average Handle Time (AHT)

Your AHT is the average time it takes an agent to complete one interaction. Customers value their time. They want you to value it, too. So, typically, the lower your AHT, the higher your call center productivity and the happier your customers are.

Higher handle times tend to indicate agents don’t have the resources to help customers quickly. It may also reveal clunky processes and slow tech. With AHT, you can track the quality of your customer experience, employee performance, and the effectiveness of your operations.

4. Track Your Transfer Rate

Customers don’t want to get passed from person to person to get help. To measure call center performance, track how often agents transfer customers to another agent or escalate calls.

In a healthy call center, agents should be empowered to handle customer inquiries independently. A high transfer rate indicates agents are missing training or the autonomy to problem-solve on their own. To boost productivity, ensure your agents have what they need to help customers without transferring them to someone else.

5. Assess Call Recordings

Metrics and KPIs are great, but numbers don’t always give you the full picture. You can offer more accurate and specific coaching to agents using call recordings. This call center performance management tool lets you to listen back to previous interactions and assess how an agent performed in light of the circumstances.

Pull specific segments to illustrate best practices in your next coaching session. Or use recordings to track trends in customer sentiment to better prepare your team.

5 Tips for an Effective Call Center

Once you measure your performance, you have to actually do the management part. Here are five ways to improve your call center performance.

Tip 1. Invest in WFM Solutions

You’ve got plenty on your plate as a manager. You don’t have time to dig through data to create the perfect shift schedule from scratch. And you certainly can’t look through spreadsheets and forecast what tomorrow will look like.

Workforce management (WFM) solutions do the forecasting, scheduling adherence, and routing for you. With WFM solutions, you can relieve daily stressors and reduce workloads for yourself and your agents by building optimal agent schedules. Intraday management enables you to remain agile and ensure customers get help fast. Overall, when you improve your operations, your performance will improve as well.

Tip 2. Implement AI and Automation

AI and automation are the new frontier. It may feel intimidating, but embracing AI and automation is critical to staying competitive and meeting customer expectations. Call center AI can help you identify, understand, and then process insights from daily support conversations. Or it can automate repetitive tasks, reduce customer wait times, and lower call volume.

Adding AI into your IVR using IVA and chatbots  (*cough* like what Broadvoice offers!) so you can engage with customers without involving a human agent. It can even answer questions, provide information, and help with transactional processes. Or create advanced workflow builders to streamline processes. With WFA, manage and automate tasks so your entire center is more efficient.

Tip 3. Upgrade Your Software

For effective call center performance management, quality software is your friend. Your call center platform should never be the source of your frustrations. And it certainly shouldn’t slow you down or create friction for your agents.

Your software should have the most updated features available. Here’s a hint. Invest in a cloud-based, scalable, omnichannel solution that plugs right into your existing infrastructure. Find a platform that can track data and analytics , giving you reporting tools that make it easy to manage performance with KPIs and metrics.

Need help choosing a new call center solution? Check out our guide to the best call center solutions for small businesses.

Tip 4. Train and Engage Your Agents

Let’s not forget the people behind your service. It doesn’t matter how great your processes or tech are if you have ill-equipped, overwhelmed, or unhappy agents. When they’re disengaged, everything suffers — especially your customers.

The best way to combat turnover and disengagement is with great onboarding and ongoing training. In fact, reports show that with better training, 69% of agents are more likely to stay with a company for at least three years. Plus, training is the best antidote for low performance. Prioritize time in your day for intentional training and individual coaching sessions for each agent on your team. I promise — it will pay off!

Tip 5. Add Self-Service Options

Nowadays, customers actually want to help themselves. In fact, 40% of consumers prefer self-service over human contact. Plus, good self-service options reduce pressure from high call volumes.

To improve call center performance, add in self-service tools. Integrate chatbots to answer simple questions via phone, text, or live chat. Or boost your knowledge base materials with helpful guides and how-to videos to empower customers to help themselves.

Request a demo to learn more about how we can improve your call center efficiency.