Are You Scoring Your Agents Based on Their Skill Level?

Your call center is up and running. The phones are answered and customers are being served, but there’s still room for improvement. However, are you using agent scoring to properly analyze your call center productivity?

Automation, machine learning, AI, they are all useful tools to improve your call center. The advantage that they give you is that they allow you to give more individualized service in a way that is easily scalable.

Technology today has the ability to connect the perfect representative for each caller, but it can’t work miracles. Your system needs a metric to be able to understand what each representative is like. This allows their unique skills can be fully utilized. Scoring your agents is the metric you use to do that.

How Do You Assess Your Calling Agent’s Score?

There are myriad factors to consider when deciding how to score your agents. What you want to be scoring and how important each factor is depends on your business. It will shift depending on the company and what their needs are.

The way you set your score will be a reflection of your business. Rewarding particular behaviors that align with your business standards helps in optimizing your customer experience. You are setting the standards that you want your agents to follow. Doing so dictates what kind of performance they should consistently give.

Factors For an Agent’s Score

Some things to look at when scoring your agents include:

• Greeting – Did the agent properly answer the call, greeting the customer in the manner you wish? Did they start with the prerequisite information like thanking the caller, introducing themselves and mentioning the company name? Are agents informing the customers about call recording procedures properly?
• Account Verification – Did the agent verify all the important account details of the customer to make sure they know who they are interacting with?
• Contact Information – If it’s relevant, did the agent ask for the contact information of the caller?
• Problem Solving – Did the agent own the problem and do their best to solve it?
• Follow Protocols – Did the agent follow all of your company’s protocols and scripts at all times?
• Service Quality – How well did the agent service the customer?
• Follow Up – Did they follow up if that was called for in their process?

Following ethical call standards is also important for your agents. Proper calling ethics can help set you apart from competitors who may be spamming leads or providing customers with misinformation.

Determining the areas of interaction your calling agents and customers should be scored on will likely depend on your industry. Setting the proper goals to generate a score and track metrics is the first step required to implementing agent scoring.

How Can You Implement Your Call Scoring?

What are your options for scoring your agents? Once you’ve decided what factors to score your agents on, you need to define how to accurately analyze this data.

In House Agent Score Analysis

The fastest system to implement is doing an in house analysis. You can have the managers review the calls of different agents to determine their individual scores. It is very accurate, and any insights the manager learns while doing it can be instantly applied. The problem with this system is that it is slow and tedious. Only a fraction of the calls your center receives can be properly screened.

Customer feedback is a valuable metric to consider. How the customer feels about the call is one of the major goals of customer service in the first place. You can measure exactly how well you’re doing based on how satisfied the callers were. One problem, though, is that customers aren’t very objective.

AI Agent Score Analysis

The newest option is to score your calls automatically. You train machine learning algorithms with different calls that you have already scored, and they learn how to identify what each call was. It is a lot cheaper to scale, and you have the advantage of being able to score every call. So you have a much more complete view of each agent. However, one problem with automated agent scoring is setting up the system and getting the right training data to get the ball rolling.

How To Utilize Your Calling Agent Scores

With the strengths and weaknesses of each of your agents available in black in white, you next need to decide what to do with this information. There are several ways to use this data depending on the goal of your call center.

Customer Service Agent Scoring

For instance, if you are performing customer service, you can match skill sets with customers. If a customer has a certain kind of question, you can find the best agent to answer the question competently. Customers have shorter wait times, and employees don’t need as much training. If possible, you can also match calls up by region, offering them service that sounds like it’s coming from their own back yard.

Sales Agent Scoring

For sales, you are able to find the best callers to work together. The best combination of an opener and closer can be found and made available. As incoming leads are qualified, the quality of leads can be sent to the salesmen that match the skill set required. This can optimize your sales process and result in closing more deals.

Integrating calling agent scores with your CRM platform will help your business flow seamlessly. In fact, implementing these types of integrations will allow for better analysis and transparency of the data you are collecting on your agents. Platforms like Salesforce accept both skill and queue-based routing of calls.

Using Call Tracking Software For Your Scoring Goals

Unless you plan on scoring every agent in your entire company using a spreadsheet, you are going to need to be able to keep track of what happens in your calls. Having software that automatically keeps track of all the metrics frees up time to analyze that data and mine value from it.

The right call tracking software will be what gives your system essential raw data to automate the process of scoring your calls. Whether you are old fashioned or not, some sort of automation is going to happen. Machine learning algorithms aren’t magic. They work best when they have good information to go on.

Being able to track everything automatically will give the machines the data they need to learn.

Scoring metrics might include:

• Average Speed of Answering
• First-Call Resolution
• Average Handle Time
• Customer Satisfaction Score
• Net Promoter Score
• Customer Effort Score

Using all of these metrics together gives you a good idea of what kind of job your agents are doing and how the customer feels about your company. Additionally, managing customers’ problems efficiently helps to build your business’ reputation.

Statistically, acquiring new customers costs on average 7 times more that it would to retain existing ones. Customer loyalty is an incentivising factor which will help your bottom line.

Also, ensuring your calling agents don’t burn out quickly provides more effective service. Your call center’s effectiveness will increase with better training and faster response times.

Scoring your agents is a good idea for businesses running modern call centers. Routing customers to the right agents will streamline your workflow and optimally improve the customer’s experience. Automating this process is simple if you have the right software available to track all of your center’s calls.