I was at a contact center conference in February in sunny Orlando, the self-professed “Most Magical Place on Earth.”
My first morning I met a super nice Contact Center Director that needed a break after 3 straight days of waxing poetic about ‘average handle times’ and ‘call center shrinkage’ — and he hoped I wasn’t a vendor. Well, I was, and a chatty one at that, but he was still nice enough to ‘introduce’ me to (aka dump me off on) all his newfound cronies from the site tours. I took a cue from him and, for once in my life, listened more than I blabbed. What did I learn? Besides that a lot of contact center folk are NASCAR fans and some can even stilt, I learned this shocking trend:
Many centers are only listening to 1-2 calls per agent A WEEK!
Really? Do they find anything? Do the agents say anything wrong in those 1-2 calls? Do they do anything exceptionally right? What are the chances they’ll uncover either of these scenarios?
When I stated the obvious, that they need to do more to find those training nuggets, I empathized with the typical response: “Not even Big Brother has the kind of time it takes to listen to all those calls!”
But how else are the agents going to improve, I pondered? No one wants to listen to anecdotal examples in a performance review – you need real, uncontestable cases. How to find those needles in the haystack of recorded calls, you ask?
Technology is How – Big Brother!
Technology is available to help your QA people target the calls with the highest propensity to offer a trainable opportunity, good or bad. The kicker is that by using a speech analytics technology, you don’t have to listen to the entire call to find the nugget; you are directed to the exact moment where trainable opportunity part(s) of the call happen.
Think about how many real call examples managers could offer up in their agent 1on1s if they didn’t have to waste time listening to standard run-of-the-mill average calls — which frankly, for good or naught, most of them are. Your 20 minutes per agent per week could be spent listening to 30 ‘juicy’ seconds of 40 calls versus nothing useful in 2 full-length, 10-minute calls.
So, if you are ready to say bye bye to random sampling and hello to 100% coverage with technology that allows you to review only the relevant seconds of your contact center calls, let’s connect and talk technology!
If you want to learn more about PerformLine’s Call Center Monitoring solution, our experts are ready to help.
Gianna Kennedy 