Boost Call Center Efficiency with Smart Training Strategies

Any call center’s performance is only as good as the performance of its weakest agent. That’s why organizations are working hard to bring all their agents up to speed to perform like their best agents.

Investing in customer service training and performance management can certainly elevate the call center agent performance, but its benefits go far beyond that. With the right technology, agent coaching and performance management can also solve some of the most pressing challenges call centers are facing today, including:

• High employee attrition rates and low employee morale
• Difficulties with providing good service quality and customer experience (CX)
• Compliance risks due to human error.

Read on to learn how.

1. Tackling Employee Attrition and Low Employee Morale

With the shift toward digital and the increase in customer interaction channels, contact centers are under growing pressure to do more with less—with this burden often transferred directly to the agents.

With tight quality and compliance frameworks and demanding customers, they are fighting an uphill battle that often pushes them to the verge of burnout, and ultimately quitting their jobs.

No wonder the agent turnover rate keeps rising and many contact center leaders are facing staffing shortages. While there are more support agent open positions than qualified candidates, replacing an agent is a costly and lengthy process, which puts contact centers in a difficult position.

To counter employee attrition and improve morale, contact centers are adopting CX automation solutions that can not only improve the customer experience but also keep agents engaged and motivated.

Call centers relying on traditional, manual scoring techniques are only able to review training needs.

With automated quality management, contact centers can evaluate up to 100% of interactions, allowing them to spot quality and compliance gaps that stayed hidden with manual evaluation methods. These solutions can also capture agent activity and translate that data into real-time coaching, performance scorecards, and automatic assignment of e-learning when needed.

Companies that can score every interaction have a significantly bigger set of data that gives a more comprehensive picture of an employee’s real performance. And it’s not just the technicality of 100% coverage, but also the objective nature of these evaluations.

Objective scoring can highly improve agent morale as it weeds out biased evaluations and favoritism. Instead, automated quality management solutions bring about objective, non-biased scoring—along with fact-based and timely feedback. This can dramatically increase agents’ trust and confidence that the evaluations were based on actual data and reflect their true performance.

Find out how Bank of Baroda, India’s largest public sector bank, used automated quality management solutions to identify soft-skill gaps among their agents and provide targeted coaching and training to eliminate these gaps. 

2. Elevating Service Quality and Customer Experience

Making customers happy while keeping up service quality is a demanding and stressful task. Agents must do their best to drive all interactions toward a positive outcome in the face of a growing number of interaction channels, repetitive tasks, and frustrated customers.

Contact centers that are aware of these challenges and can proactively support their agents to solve them are much more likely to retain their employees. Although contact centers cannot simply take frustrated customers out of the equation, they can implement smart solutions that can ease agents’ jobs, such as real-time support and coaching for handling argumentative callers or automating tedious tasks.

Automated quality solutions, such as performance scoring, can track performance KPIs and identify trends in agent performance. If an employee’s KPIs fall below the team’s pre-defined threshold, the bot proactively auto-assigns coaching to them. It also enables self-coaching by providing agents with access to their scorecards, giving them a clear and objective view of their performance and an opportunity for improvement.

Learn more about improving call center quality with CX automation here.

3. Minimizing Compliance Risks Resulting from Human Error

Maintaining high performance at a call center requires more than being able to give timely responses and handle challenging customers.

Support agents must also comply with regulations, industry standards and internal processes. Failing to meet such requirements can lead to poor CX, severe fines, damage to your hard-earned reputation, or other penalties.

Because as little as omitting a few key regulatory statements from a customer interaction can have serious consequences, agents can highly benefit from intelligent compliance solutions, such as compliance scoring.

Let’s take, for example, Verint Quality Bot, which can spot compliance mistakes in thousands of interactions. Based on these insights, Verint Coaching Bot can then provide agents with real-time reminders about relevant compliance procedures, giving them real-time call center agent training opportunities.

Learn more about improving call center compliance here.

Improve Your Call Center Training with Verint Automated Quality Solutions

A call center training and performance management program is not something you create once and never touch again. Customer service agents operate in a constantly changing environment, including updating regulations, implementing new tech, introducing new interaction channels, and more.

If you want your training program to stay relevant and help your agents excel in their roles, you can best augment their skills with CX automation and AI-powered specialized bots, such as Verint Quality Bot, that can help you realize real business outcomes risk-free, without disrupting your existing workflows.

Discover more about how Automated Quality Management can help you improve your call center training program here.

Learn more about call center agent training from our guide here.