Tracking Contact Center Performance Without Missing a Beat: How to Monitor KPIs When the Team is Working Remote

Contact center managers regularly monitor their teams to ensure the utmost productivity in delivering fast issue resolution for customers with a friendly, approach.  But what happens when the team, who may typically sit in the same office environment, suddenly becomes 100% work from home.  Managing a remote call center team certainly has its challenges. However, just because you’re not in the office together, it doesn’t mean you can’t stay connected. There’s no need to suddenly become a micromanager thinking that remote work will lead to a drop in productivity. You’ve got a great team, and they can quickly adapt to the new environment. With the right tools and technology, you’ll also be able to monitor the output of the contact center team, allowing you to optimize performance regardless of location.

Remote Work Doesn’t Change Team Performance Indicators

Changing where your team works won’t change the performance indicators you currently track. If you are already monitoring team performance via key performance indicators (KPIs) or other metrics, they still apply.

You may see an increase in productivity. Your employees no longer have to commute, so they have more time and energy to accomplish more. A 2019 survey found that by eliminating daily commutes, workers were more productive and healthier.

Your strategy for keeping your team on track hasn’t been derailed by remote work. It simply changes the environment.

How to Monitor a Remote Team’s Performance

Depending on each employee’s role, they’ll have different performance metrics. Some jobs are defined very well by performance indicators, especially for those working in a contact center or for salespeople who have certain thresholds to meet. You can customize performance metrics based on the tools and technology available. Here’s how.

Do You Have the Right Technology?

First, it’s essential to have the right technology in place to help you monitor the performance of your team from wherever they are located. In the case of quantifiable indicators, contact center software delivers a wealth of information in reports for agent productivity. If you need to look at the overall time spent working or being online, a UCaaS (unified communications as a service) platform can offer you insights as well.

Worker Status Monitoring

With an instant chat platform, presence indicators show when workers are online and available so contact center managers can filter inbound queries to available agents with speed and efficiency. For an aggregate view of chat performance, with the right tools, you can run reports to track how much time workers spent online and available.  This can help to allocate resources appropriately with extra agents taking on chat during higher volume times while shifting to phones when chat is not as active.

Call Analytics

It’s vital to manage call analytics within your contact center or for salespeople reaching out to customers and prospects. With call data, you can understand the aggregate performance of the team and, much as you do in the office environment, locate areas that are sub-optimized and may need further review.

What can you monitor with call analytics?

• Queue performance: Determine how well the queue moved and what roadblocks may be in the way for agents.
• Call volume: Knowing the periods of highest call volume can help you shift your coverage model to reduce queue wait times and speed issue resolution
• Team performance, including how long agents spend on calls, the number of calls taken, and issue resolution.

These data points offer you a holistic view of operations and can point out outliers. Once you know where your team is struggling, you can offer them the support they need to improve. For those with high-performance metrics, you can look to them to provide advice to coworkers.

Call Monitoring: Ensuring Quality Connections

Call monitoring is another way that contact center managers audit team performance and identify areas for coaching and career development.  If you record calls, keep in mind that you’ll need to do so in a compliant manner and advise customers of the same. By sampling call recordings for employees, you can quickly pick up on the quality of the information they are providing as well as uncover challenges.

For example, if you haven’t integrated your CRM (customer relationship management) software with your contact center, agents may struggle to get caught up on the customer’s experiences with your company. It’s not the fault of your employees but can be an area for improvement.

Collaborative Coaching

In addition to standard quality analysis, consider a collaborative coaching approach. Have your supervisors listen to calls alongside their agents and ask the agent to rate themselves against your predefined standards. This allows the agent to take ownership of their performance and leads to self-realization about how well they did and where there might be room for improvement on things like troubleshooting, communication style, or tone of voice. Sure, this type of coaching takes time away from answering calls, but can have a large impact on the quality of operations and overall customer service rating of your call center.

Flexible Options

Monitoring the productivity of a contact center function has always been important and shifting to a remote work environment does not have to negate that ability in any way. It’s ideal to have flexible options available that work no matter where your employees are. To ensure you can adjust as needed, choose a provider that doesn’t lock you down into specifics and allows you to add or remove users with ease.

Further, you want to make sure you have a platform that has optimal uptime. You can’t afford to have any downtime when it comes to serving your customers or enabling your team to do their job. Remember these things as you look to purchase or replace your contact center software.

Staying connected matters in business. The right tools will allow you to have access to metrics that matter. Learn more about remote contact centers and how to implement them successfully.