4 Ways to Gauge Agent Engagement in the Modern Contact Centre

The business world is constantly evolving, and the contact centre is not immune to these changes. Policies, technologies and metrics that were good enough last year are insufficient today. The guidelines for contact centre success must be adjusted to incorporate new needs, new technologies and—most importantly—a new generation of employees.

With this in mind, here are four areas we can emphasise to accurately judge our contact centres to ensure they are providing the best service to our customers and agents.

4 Metrics to Measure Agent Engagement in the Modern Contact Centre

1. Employee retention

When it comes to improving customer service, employee retention is the most important metric. Your contact centre agents are the bridge to your customers, and the more experienced your agents are, the more value they add to the customer experience. Today, contact centre agents are tasked with fielding increasingly difficult issues—those that cannot be solved through a website FAQ. Improving employee retention rates can improve the health of your contact centre and customer experience.

2. Attendance, adherence and availability

Okay, so that’s three in one, but I’m lumping them together for purposes of argument. Lower scores in any of these categories not only show a performance issue but also that the agent lacks interest in their work, both of which are bad for your business. These metrics are often linked to retention rates (see above). One way to counteract issues with these metrics is by providing contact centre agents with tools that allow them to monitor their own metrics. When agents can see their metrics they are more likely to proactively review and use daily performance reports for effective self-coaching

3. Agent benchmarking scores

The days of evaluating a couple random interactions are in the past. Modern contact centres are using emerging predictive analytics technologies to allow managers to connect evaluation scores with agent benchmarking technology. This allows them to compare agents of similar tenure, training, skills, etc. in order to gain a better idea of overall performance.

4. Voice-of-the-employee trends

A Gallup poll places a bleak outlook on employee engagement, discovering that only 13 percent of employees report being engaged at work. That’s really low, and even if the percentage at your own office is higher, determining the exact number is difficult. Modern contact centre analytics tools reveal VoE insights to enable coaching and training, and allow managers to identify and address issues before they impact employee engagement or lead to turnover.

The modern contact centre is always changing, but getting ahead of the curve is possible. Download our guide, The Definitive Guide to the Modern Contact Centre, to learn even more about this topic and more!

Brad Snedeker

Brad Snedeker is the Director of Customer Advocacy at Calabrio. With over 15 years in the industry, Brad has extensive knowledge of the contact center space. As Calabrio’s head of the Innovation Center, he works directly with users to teach and develop new and innovative techniques to implement customer engagement and WFO best practices.