Bad QA scores tell you there are issues in your contact center that need urgent attention. But they could also indicate you are not using the right metrics.
Data has revolutionized the way contact centers function. Business intelligence allows companies to pinpoint exactly what their customers want and enable them to focus their attention on where it is needed most – the customer experience.
This pivot towards a more customer-centric focus needs to reverberate throughout the business and reflect in the way we measure success. Nowhere is this more important than in how we view team performance.
By effectively transforming the way you interact with customers, you are also affecting how your sales teams handle their conversations. This needs to translate in your performance metrics.
Combining your CX strategy with your QA objectives will not only redefine what you’re measuring against and ensure a fairer, more accurate way to calculate QA scores. It will also empower your sales team with the tools they need for success.
Prepare the Foundation
Before you create your revised KPIs, you need to align your company-wide activities to ensure your sales team have a good solid foundation in place to increase the likelihood of successful outcomes.
You can do this in various ways:
- Supplying high-quality, qualified leads
- Training and continuous improvement
- Rewarding top performers
- Investigating the ROI and effectiveness of channels
- Utilizing your technology – ie, reporting that automatically collects survey scores and integrating with a CRM system that fairly distributes leads
Broaden Your Scope
Adopting a customer-centric thinking to other aspects of your business necessitates looking outside the scope of team and individual performance. These new factors take into account how your customers engage with your business.
These can include:
- The customer journey
- Omnichannel touchpoints
- Customer needs and expectations
- Data analytics
With this new approach, measuring the success of your agents’ performance also requires taking into account the voice of the customer:
- Sentiment analysis
- Customer surveys
- Focus groups
- Complaint records
- Call recording
- Omnichannel conversations
Now that you are armed with crucial customer and interaction data, you can relook at the metrics for sales agent KPIs. Consider some of the following, for example:
- Sales first-call resolutions (the equivalent of a hole in one)
- Open-ended questions in customer surveys for more accurate feedback
- Omnichannel engagement (in other words, ditch your average handle time and rather focus on resolution rates across all channels)
There are countless resources out there to help measure the effectiveness of sales teams’ performance, but with more and more focus being placed on CX in the contact center, it is time to relook old and tired metrics and take a more customer-centric approach to measuring success.
Besides, happier, more loyal customers will aid sales and increase your team’s chances of cross-selling – customers that have a good relationship with your company will be more likely to buy and buy again.
Looking for more contact center best practice? Try Why Hold Time Should Be on Your Contact Center Watchlist.