When I coached high school volleyball, each of my players had different strengths and weaknesses.
As I created practice plans, I would add drills to our practice that would help the team as a whole. Then I would also add in other drills so that I could provide personalized attention for specific players. My practices were customized to my team to help them improve.
This is the same for your call center team. If you want your call center agents to improve their performance, it's going to take both training that is good for the whole team and personalized attention.
As I’ve worked for ScreenSteps — a knowledge base software company that helps call centers support agents — I’ve witnessed the power of intent in supporting your call center agents. This is what helps them improve. And there are many ways to accomplish this.
Below, I provide seven tips for how to provide widespread and personalized support to help your call center agents improve their performance. These tips will help you recognize new steps you can take to help your agents progress and perform better on the job.
What call center KPIs (key performance indicators) are you measuring? When you evaluate and understand the metrics, you can identify your company’s (and individual agents’) weaknesses and strengths.
Then you can address those areas in coaching sessions or training.
For example, say you want to decrease average handle time, so you’ve emphasized this to your call center agents. Now, one agent is showing decreased average handle time, but you’ve noticed that this agent’s First Call Resolution score is dropping. It could be because this agent is now rushing through the call and missing important information.
You need to look at the big picture to help pinpoint specific areas where individual agents can improve their performance.
Create a continuous learning plan so that agents can continue to develop their skills. Professional development is not only good for acquiring new skills, but it also helps improve employees’ feelings of self-worth.
Often, businesses approach onboarding as a one-and-done training session. But an athlete that learns to dunk a basketball with no one guarding them doesn’t do it once and thinks, “I’m pro now.” They keep practicing and building on those skills.
Your call center agents need support in building on the skills that they learned during onboard training. Having a continuous learning plan provides a way for your agents to continue to grow.
Some continuous learning options include:
🔍 Related: How to Build a Continuous Learning Plan for Call Center Reps
Provide phone coaching opportunities with a trainer, expert, or designated phone coach. This individual attention helps agents receive personalized feedback. It has a more direct impact on their work and is immediately applicable.
Preferably, you will be able to have these phone coaching sessions live. This means the coach can listen in as an agent handles a call. Immediately after the call, the phone coach can discuss with the agent how the call went and areas for improvement.
Live phone sessions are better because agents are in the moment. They remember why they were making the choices they did on the call. When phone coaching takes place with a recorded call, agents often forget why they made those decisions.
🔍 Related: 5 Tips to Improve Call Center Coaching (+ Example Coaching Phrases)
Documented policies and procedures are often considered the forgotten child of your work family. Companies create them, but then they let them gather dust until it’s time to update them for compliance purposes or another reason.
Change your approach to documentation. Create policy and procedure documents that are intended to support agents while they are in the workflow.
Having your policies and procedures documented provides agents with 24/7 support. If your agents have questions, they can find answers in your policies and procedures.
Note: If it is difficult for your agents to access your documents or your search function doesn’t quickly take agents to the answers they are seeking, your documented procedures won’t help.
Call center call flows help your agents know what to say and do on a call. It removes the pressure of memorizing because the information is in front of them.
However, sometimes call flows can be overwhelming because they contain too much information. Your call flows get crowded with too many details so it is difficult for agents to follow the outline while they are on a call.
Update your call flows so they are easier to follow. You can do that by switching out “if/then” statements for questions, adding design elements (bolding, indentations, colors, etc.), and adding screenshots that show agents where they need to click on the screen.
For tips on how to write clear call flows that don’t require your agents to put the caller on hold, read this blog.
If your agents are required to memorize all the policies and procedures in your company, that is a lot of information to retain. And, the reality is that people don’t remember everything they are told and learn.
So, what if they didn’t have to memorize everything?
Assign different agents to teams that handle specific types of calls. You can have designated agents for troubleshooting calls, on specific products, or another assignment organization.
You can even assign specific employees to handle intake calls so that agents only need to handle a specific part of a process. Or, you could adopt an interactive voice response system (IVR) or another call routing system.
The point is you redistribute the workload so that no one employee is overwhelmed with everything they have to remember. They can specialize in one thing and do it extremely well.
Don’t leave your agents in call center no man’s land. That is to say, don’t onboard your call center agents and expect them to be experts from the get-go.
Provide them with support technology so that they can be efficient with their jobs.
There are many options for call center support tools. Some improve accessibility to your resources, some provide training support, and others help with operations. Here are a few call center support software systems to consider:
🔍 Related: Improve Employee Performance: When to Use an LMS vs Knowledge Base
To improve call center agent performance, you need to provide them with support. This includes opportunities to learn as well as tools. If you are looking to improve your documentation and call flows, a knowledge base is the tool your call center needs.
Our ScreenSteps knowledge base software is a fast and easy way to document your call flows, policies, and procedures. With templates and intuitive content creation tools, one customer said they now create 4X the content in ¼ of the time. Plus, it is easy for call center agents to follow these guides.
There are many knowledge base software companies available — and they all have different strengths and weaknesses. So, how do you know which is the right fit for your call center?
Read this blog post for five tips on how to choose the knowledge base that will help you reach your call center goal of improving employee performance.