If you want to have an optimally successful contact center, you must deliver exceptional customer service experiences that keep customers happy and coming back. If you want your contact center to deliver exceptional customer service, you have to invest in your agents. 

Investing in your agents goes beyond basic training, and effectively managing them comes with a multitude of ins and outs. Many contact centers start by implementing a solid training program. While this is a good place to start, the real challenge comes in creating a supportive environment that fosters continuous improvement and keeps agents motivated and engaged over the long term. 

So how can contact centers ensure their agents are as efficient as possible? 

It all comes down to analytics. Making data-driven decisions is the key to unlocking agent potential and optimizing contact center performance – it empowers you to move beyond guesswork and focus on strategies that truly make a difference.

The problem: why traditional methods fall short

Perhaps the most well-known method of improving agent performance looks a lot like this: a contact center manager spends some time with an agent, or a group of agents, to coach them. The manager may even follow up with agents individually to ensure progress is being made. 

While this method isn’t completely useless, relying solely on coaching and follow-up has limitations. For instance, coaching may depend more on subjectivity than concrete data, and agents may receive mixed messages from different supervisors.

Additionally, the training may lack consistency or be too generalized to be completely relevant for specific agents and use cases. Lastly, without data, tracking post-correction progress is difficult and may even require constant manager oversight.

While intuition and experience are important in improving agent performance, sustainable and efficient improvement requires data-driven insights. Data provides a clear picture of agent performance, pinpointing specific areas for development. It allows for targeted coaching tailored to each agent’s needs and facilitates objective progress tracking, empowering managers to measure the success of their adjustments and celebrate improvements. 

The solution: using analytics to improve agent performance

It’s clear that analytics are crucial for improving agent performance. Here’s how to integrate analytics into your contact center management in three simple steps:

1. Automatically capture data through call center software

Call center software that eliminates manual data collection by automatically capturing data saves you time and money. This data, which provides information to you on all agent interactions that occurred on any channel, is then available to you through many sources.

One of these sources is call recording, where calls are stored within the contact center software system. This protects your contact center against compliance risks and provides concrete evidence to be used for training opportunities. 

Voice Analytics automatically analyzes recorded conversations to extract valuable data to help you improve your customer experience and agent performance.

By combining call recording and Voice Analytics, contact center software can offer a comprehensive view of agent conversations, providing valuable insights to improve customer experience and agent performance.

2. Customize analytics to boost agent performance

The beauty of call center software lies in its customizable data capture. Voice Analytics empowers you to track metrics that matter most to your contact center, ensuring agent training aligns with your unique KPIs. It also uncovers patterns within your conversations, helping you find ways to increase customer satisfaction and refine training programs.

Reporting and Analytics tools help you interpret the collected data and even make data-driven predictions – putting your data to work to pinpoint exact areas for improvement, whether it’s reducing call handle time, boosting first-call resolution or maximizing revenue per call. 

3. Empower agents for improvement

Once you’ve collected, analyzed and understood your data, it’s time to unlock its true potential. As a call center manager, your job would be to utilize these analytics to make data-driven decisions, provide targeted coaching opportunities and track progress over time.

Making these insights available to your agents can also be paramount for agent improvement because agents can use this personal performance data to identify areas for personal, non-subjective improvement and even track their own progress. 

Benefits of using analytics to improve agent performance

Leveraging analytics to improve your agent’s performance unlocks a powerhouse of improvements for your contact center. It can help identify time-wasters and areas for workflow optimization, increasing agent efficiency and productivity. 

It creates agents who can better address customer needs and resolve issues faster, leading to improved first-call resolution rates, customer satisfaction and customer loyalty.

Identifying trends and adjusting contact center operations creates a straight path to optimal call center performance and opens the door to broader, smarter training programs and more strategic staffing decisions.

Using analytics to make improvement effortless

Imagine a contact center where agent performance consistently improves, leading to happier customers and a thriving business. That’s the power of data-driven decision-making.

The good news is that implementing this strategy isn’t a heavy lift – TCN’s contact center software takes care of the data collection and analysis, leaving you with actionable insights. From there, all you have to do is take the information, apply it to your training and make necessary adjustments. Tracking the progress of these adjustments is effortless.

Analytics transform your contact center from reactive to proactive. Check out this page to learn more about how TCN can empower you to use analytics to improve agent performance.