6 Tips to Improve the Productivity of Your Call Center Agents

We all are aware of the fact that contact center services have a huge part to play when it comes to improving an organization’s productivity and efficiency. And in order to drive the productivity improvements we do need to pay attention towards the call center agents and how consistently we could achieve the best out of them.

Given below are the best strategies for improving the productivity of agents in the long-term.
Healthy competition within the organization: Giving your agents an opportunity to compare themselves with their 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 center agents and boosting 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.

Multi-channel across the board: Providing a multi–channel 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 center industry. With multi-channel, 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 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, whereas, 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 of all the customers is crucial for the agents and customers alike, especially when you get into the realms of multi-channel customer communications.
Ensure Managers are hands-on: It is important for the team morale and productivity that the managers lead by 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 team spirit which is a major key for the long-term productivity of a call center.
Allowing them to work from home: Allowing the agents to spend some time or giving them an option to work from home allows them to work flexibly, showing trust.  A cloud-based system could make it easy to implement without affecting the operations of the call center or how customers are being managed, and you could still keep a record as though they were in office.
Listening to all the Employees in the Call center Industry : Being attentive to all the quality monitoring tools, listening to them frequently, and giving the agents a positive feedback where it is merited has been constructive and a supportive criticism to the organization. Also, make them listen to their own calls in order to get a better perspective, and make them be a part of the process of addressing the various areas of improvements in a call center.
To conclude, increasing the productivity of your call center agents is not gained by asking them to work long hours, or by taking few breaks, or by working during the weekends. What is required is their engagement with their work, the perception of being the most valuable member of the team, rewarding performance, and encouraging them to take appropriate breaks because we know how stressful it is to be a call center agent.
About The Author
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.