Call Center Agent Performance Dashboard – Track, Benchmark, and Improve Customer Service QA Delivery

What are the Benefits of an Agent Dashboard?

Most call center managers consider the agent performance dashboard essential to achieving customer service goals. The dashboard can help call centers improve customer service in many ways. Below are some of the main benefits of the use of dashboards:

1. Improves Customer Service QA KPI Metrics

A call center agent dashboard can help improve customer interactions for resolving inquiries or problems on the first call and achieve a great customer satisfaction (Csat) score. After all, most customers expect their inquiry or problem to be resolved on the first interaction with a company’s call center.

A call center agent dashboard can help track, benchmark, and improve customer service quality assurance (QA) delivery. The agent dashboard and reports provide insights from analyzing CX data over a period of time. Typical agent customer service QA dashboard metrics include:

• Total Customer Service QA score
• Customer Satisfaction Score
• First Call Resolution
• Call Resolution
• Positive CX Journey Rating
• Call Compliance Critical Error

2. Improves Agent Engagement

According to Gallup, their research found employees who think their manager holds them accountable for performance are 2.5x more likely to be engaged in their job. The agent dashboard provides them insights into their performance that they are held accountable for achieving.

When a dashboard is available for an agent to view their customer service QA performance, it is common for them to improve CX without receiving any coaching and training. The main reason agents can enhance their CX performance without coaching and training is that the customer service QA dashboard helps creates awareness and accountability of their CX performance. As a result, agents can self-correct their call-handling behaviors to enhance the CX without coaching and training.

Moreover, the higher the awareness of the metrics they are accountable for achieving and engagement, the happier agents work in a call center. Also, the customer service QA dashboard allows a supervisor or manager to share CX insights with their team and work collaboratively to improve CX and productivity opportunities.

3. Improves Call Center Inefficiencies

If customer service QA is properly implemented, a call center can expect up to a 10% improvement in FCR. That means for an average call center performing at a 70% FCR rate, if they improved by a 10% FCR rate, they would be performing at the world-class FCR rate of 80%, which only 5% of call centers achieve.

In addition, the benefits of FCR for driving customer service QA improvement are immense. For example, SQM Group's research shows for "every 1% improvement in FCR, there is a 1% improvement in customer satisfaction." Also, for "every 1% improvement in FCR, you reduce your operating costs by 1%." Therefore, the agent dashboard is essential in helping customer service QA drive FCR and cost improvement.

The CX data dashboard insights at the call center level will help managers spot customer service QA inefficiencies. In addition, the CX insights will empower call center managers to improve people, processes, and technology practices to improve operating costs and enhance CX.

Call center dashboard metrics can help supervisors and managers regularly monitor and coach agents to improve the KPI metrics of the call center. In addition, call center dashboards provide insights into agent CX performance trends and identify agents who need more coaching and training to improve CX. Moreover, 360-degree feedback data in the agent dashboard has improved call center CX, FCR, and cost inefficiencies.

Top 5 Tips for Agent Dashboard Reporting and Customer Service QA Delivery

Agent dashboard reporting for customer service QA delivery can make it effective and efficient for agents and managers to measure call center CX performance and track, benchmark, and discover opportunities for improving CX. Below are the top 5 tips for agent dashboard and customer service QA delivery.

1. Determine Your Customer Service QA Goals

A best practice for an agent dashboard is ensuring it is aligned with the call center’s customer service goals. Then, after the call center goals have been identified and agreed upon, you can determine the KPI metrics to measure, track, benchmark, and display on the agent and call center dashboards.

Here are some questions to consider when determining customer service QA goals:

1. How many KPI metrics do you want on the dashboard?
2. Which KPI metrics are the most important?
3. What KPI metrics do you want to hold agents accountable to?
4. How will you determine customer service goal KPI metric targets?

2. Select the Right Customer Service QA KPI Metrics

SQM Group's research shows that 71% of senior call center executives strongly agree that improving a call center's CX performance is their top priority. Furthermore, high-performing call centers' measurements of success for CX are FCR, Csat, and customer retention.

Tracking, benchmarking, and analyzing call center agents' performance metrics should align with the enterprise-wide strategic goals. For example, if the enterprise goals are to improve CX and retain customers, agents should have accountability metrics that align with those goals. When a call center aligns with enterprise-wide strategic goals, it's a way to show how they add value.

Furthermore, if a call center chooses the right KPI metrics, it can significantly help the company achieve its strategic goals and show how they add value. Here are some common KPI metrics to consider using on the agent dashboard:

3. The Use of 360-Degree Feedback for Customer Service QA

From a customer service QA perspective, 360-degree feedback lets agents and supervisors get a fuller picture of a CX interacting with a call center. Furthermore, 360-degree feedback widens the lens and reduces supervisor bias, providing a clearer picture of an agent's strengths and weaknesses for the supervisor coaching agents to improve CX. Therefore, the agent dashboard data sources should include 360-degree feedback.

When a call center's primary goal is to improve CX, they tend to be more interested in utilizing a customer service QA method. The main reason is that customer service QA uses a 360-degree multi-rater approach (e.g., customers, QA evaluators, and artificial intelligence) to measure customer service QA; it has a proven track record for improving CX.

Conversely, in most cases, traditional QA uses only one rater approach to measure and provide agent feedback. In addition, the most effective customer service QA 360-degree feedback approach provides agents with insights based on behaviors they demonstrated on a call that multi-raters could see better than just one rater.

4. Actioning the Agent Scorecard Dashboard Insights

Firstly, you must ensure that agents can view their customer service QA data in real-time in an easily understood QA scorecard dashboard insights. In many cases, agents improve their customer service QA performance by viewing the QA dashboard performance and benchmarking their performance to other agents on their team or call center.

In addition, supervisors should be able to view agent QA scorecard performance to benchmark them to other agents, understand trends for key QA metrics, identification of strengths to build on and weaknesses to coach agents on behaviors and skills to improve.

To augment the agent QA scorecard dashboard, agents need access to the detailed customer service QA evaluation scorecard that shows all the metrics, call recording, screen capture, and QA evaluator notes to view before being coached by their supervisor. When agents have access to the essential QA data, it puts them in a better position to understand their performance and leverage the coaching they receive from their supervisor.

Call centers should track QA metrics trends at the agent and team levels. For example, a supervisor or analyst can determine if coaching, policies, processes, and technology changes have impacted customer service by conducting a trend analysis.

5. Follow up on Coaching to See if CX Improvement Took Place

Typically, call centers have their supervisors coach their agents on how to improve call quality. In the majority of cases, call quality is determined by a QA evaluation process. SQM's research shows that traditional quality assurance has had little or no impact on improving FCR. However, traditional QA has positively impacted the call compliance type metrics (e.g., policy adherence, screen navigation, caller verification, and cross-selling).

SQM agrees with most call center professionals' opinion that coaching agents are critical. However, there is an opportunity to be more effective at agent coaching to improve FCR, call resolution, and customer service. Given the excellent opportunity to improve agent call resolution and Csat coaching, all supervisors should be trained on a voice of the customer (VoC) agent coaching model.

The below figure shows an ongoing four-step VoC agent coaching model (i.e., 1. Call Assessment, 2. Develop Action Plan, 3. Agent Communication, and 4. Agent Feedback) and tips for helping agents improve call resolution and customer service performance.