Six tips to improve the productivity of your call centre agents

We all are aware of the fact that contact centre services have a huge part to play when it comes to the process of improving your productivity and efficiency. And in order to drive the productivity improvements we do need to pay attention towards the call centre agents and how consistently we could achieve the best out of them. Given below are the best strategies for improving the productivity of the agents in long-term.

Healthy competition within the organisation: Giving your agents an opportunity to compare themselves with the co-workers would provide a bit of information. Competition with co-workers is considered to be a natural incentive in order to motivate your call agents and boosting up their activities. Having a healthy competition would give the agents a level of playing field, rewarding those who do well and support those who might need it.

Multichannel across the board: Providing a multichannel platform for all the agents to connect with your clients and customers, is one of the best ways of increasing the productivity in a call centre industry when managed properly. With multichannel agents could easily respond to the emails, or be on the phone, whilst responding to the problem of all the customers with the IM chat. Having the right skills and without taking much time being able juggle multiple channels can boost up their productivity. So make sure that you ask and listen to your clients and customers accommodating their wishes say for example some people love the variety and the ability to handle multiple channels where as others may be comfortable handling one or the two.

Implementation of CRM software program: Ensure that you have all the required information of your clients and customers, so that your agents could access them quickly and easily without flicking through multiple screens and systems. A 360 degree for all the customers is crucial for all the happy agents and customers alike especially when you get into the realms of multichannel customer communications.

Ensure managers are hands on: It is important for the team morale and productivity that the managers lead by an example. For example, ensuring that your managers are all set and prepared to jump on calls helping out with any peaks or surges in call volumes. This could help in building the team spirit which is a major key for the long-term productivity of a call centre.

Allowing them to work from work: Allowing the agents to spend some time or giving them an option to work from home allows them to work flexibly, maximising their time showing trust.  A cloud-based system could make it easy to implement without affecting the operations of the call centre or how customers are being managed and you could still keep a track record as though they were in office.

Listening to all the employees in the call centre industry : Being attentive to all the quality monitoring tools, listening to them frequently and giving the agents a positive feedback where it has been merited, has been constructive and a supportive criticism to the organisation. The way you are able to help your call centre agents learn the technologies developing their skills and career keeping them motivated. Also, make them listen to their own calls in order to get a better perspective and being a part of the process of addressing the various areas of improvements in a call centre.

To conclude, increasing the productivity of your call centre agents is not gained by asking them to work for long hours, or by taking few breaks, or by working during the weekends. All that it would it would require here is their engagement with their work, the perception of being the most valuable member of the team, rewarding performance and the last but not the least encouraging them to take appropriate breaks optimising the software they have been using stream ling the  business process.

Abhishek Jain has over 10 years of experience within the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) Services. Business Process Outsourcing delivers and manages various offshore/onsite projects in various technologies and domains