How Contact Centers Can Better Report Agent Efficiency

The customer service a company provides has a direct impact on that company’s sales numbers. A positive experience with a contact center agent can serve as the nudge customers need to make a purchase, while a frustrating conversation can deter existing customers and put off new customers entirely.

Across industries, customer service plays a vital role in financial success. As a result, it’s important to track customer service strategies and performance continuously and make adjustments to maximize your return on investment.

Customers want agents to answer their messages and calls quickly and provide accurate, helpful information. To improve contact center efficiency, companies need to improve the performance of individual agents and the customer service team as a whole.

Before you can make strategic changes to streamline processes and increase your return on investment, you need to understand how the current customer service center operates. Below, take a closer look at how contact centers can measure customer service performance and boost their efficiency.

What Metrics Should You Be Monitoring?

Contact centers today have the ability to gather endless data about customers and conversations. To make meaningful improvements to operations, companies need to pick out the most powerful metrics for contact center reporting. These include:

• Service level: This metric is defined as the percentage of messages and calls that are answered by a live agent within the organization’s target time frame. A high service level serves as an indication that contact center agents are performing efficiently.
• Response time: Related to service level, answer speed refers to how long, on average, it takes for a caller to reach an agent. Reduce the amount of time it takes to respond to increase customer satisfaction and prevent customer abandonment.
• Occupancy: Occupancy is the amount of time an individual agent spends actively occupied on a customer interaction. An excessively low occupancy suggests the contact center has hired more agents than contact volume demands. At the same time, an excessively high occupancy may lead to agent burnout and turnover, which have their own negative effects on efficiency.
• Customer satisfaction: What may be considered the most important contact center performance metric, customer satisfaction indicates the quality of a contact center’s service and directly relates to conversions and customer retention. You can gather data about customer satisfaction through surveys or through independent analysis of conversations and interactions.

How to Improve Contact Center Metrics

Once supervisors have collected the data they need, they can take action to improve performance metrics and boost customer satisfaction. Try these tips to improve contact center efficiency:

Use Historical Data

Trends reveal themselves in data over months and years. To maximize efficiency and improvement, utilize historical data and revisit past conversations as you track your customer service center’s progress.

Use Insights to Guide Improvements

Once you have analyzed the data, make changes designed to target specific metrics. For example, if the data shows your agents are being overwhelmed with too many customer conversations, consider equipping them with the software necessary to manage their conversations more effectively. By identifying areas of weakness and offering actionable insights, reports give managers the tools they need to boost team performance.

Quiq’s Conversational Customer Engagement Software

If you want to improve your contact center’s efficiency and customer satisfaction ratings, Quiq’s conversational customer engagement software offers the features you need. Quiq’s software enables agents to manage multiple conversations simultaneously and message customers across multiple channels, including text and web chat.

By giving customers more options for engaging with customer service, Quiq reduces call volume and allows agents to focus on the conversations with the highest priority.

To discover how Quiq will improve your contact center’s metrics, request a quote today.