Your call center could be more productive, it just needs the right tools.
Today’s companies know that call centers are the heart of the brand/customer relationship, but they’ve long had a reputation as “cost centers” rather than value-adding solutions.
Fortunately, our view of the call center is starting to change.
Over the last couple of years, call centers have evolved to suit rising customer demands, an increased need for cloud continuity, and a new focus on agent experience. The call center is quickly evolving into the ‘contact center’ and is becoming the central hub for business growth.
Part of what makes the contact center so valuable today, is the information it can provide.
With access to contact center data, companies can make positive changes to workflow, delight customers, and even stop client turnover in its tracks.
Accessing this data is much easier with performance management software that offers a behind-the-scenes view into operations. Performance management software gives brands the key to excel in the age of experience.
Here’s your guide to performance management tools for the contact center.
What is Performance Management Software?
Performance management (PM) software is a tool to track and enhance team performance.
Part of the modern contact center, these programs can collect information from all throughout the omnichannel contact center environment.
Remember, 95.7% of contact center professionals deem “customer satisfaction” as the most important metric to measure business-wide. Performance management tools offer insights into the hurdles and gaps that hinder customer experience. These solutions map the way to happier customers.
With performance management software, business leaders can unlock opportunities for better engagement, training, and employee support too. When you know which actions from your agents lead to better sentiment from your customers, it’s much easier to coach your staff.
With leading tools, companies can also help supervisors and managers keep track of the complex customer communication landscape, and their employee’s engagement, tracking things like:
- Absenteeism (% of people off sick)
- Turnover (number of staff who leave)
- Average call duration
- Service level (% of calls answered in a specific time)
- % of calls abandoned
- Total calls answered
- Customer satisfaction score
Perhaps most importantly, performance management tools allow you to measure these metrics on both a historical, and real-time basis.
Performance Management with Historical and Real-time Data
You can’t improve what you can’t measure.
Performance management tools often leverage two kinds of data: real-time, and historical.
Historical data in the PM system acts as a powerful tool for predictive analytics. You can use data collected over the long term to see when your busiest times are, and ensure you have enough agents available to handle peaks in volume.
Historical information also helps you to see the progress of your employees, and how their performance is improving following training sessions. It can show you where your company is thriving, and where you may need to invest in new strategies.
Alternatively, real-time analytics highlight problems and opportunities in the moment. A real-time feed can show supervisors which employees need the most support or guidance. At the same time, real-time metrics act as a source of motivation for your team, providing them with information about their performance compared to their peers.
You can also use real-time data to keep an eye on things like lost calls, dropped calls, or call quality. This ensures that companies can make quick decisions and solve issues before they get out of hand.
The Wallboard, Dashboards, and Real-Time Data
Real-time data is the proactive solution to driving great customer experiences.
Rather than waiting to learn from months of historical data and insight, you use technology to assess the quality of a conversation, and the sentiment of a customer in the moment. Because you’re tracking the performance of every agent and monitoring each conversation in real-time, you have endless chances to prevent churn, improve customer loyalty, and drive positive outcomes.
The most effective way to track and use real-time data in the performance management world, is with wallboards and digital dashboards. These tools allow businesses to choose the real-time metrics they want to measure, like customer sentiment, calls answered per hour, and more, and display them in a valuable format.
Wallboards and dashboards show business leaders, supervisors, and your employees what kind of crucial information they should be keeping track of as they work.
When your staff can see what kind of average call handling time they’re achieving, compared to the benchmark set for their team, they know where they need to elevate their performance.
Wallboards take the huge, unorganized streams of information collected by the contact center every day and translate them into meaningful directives for success.
If performance management software is the key to more meaningful insights into business outcomes, your wallboard is the map that agents and supervisors can follow to success.
Through a real-time stream of information, companies can make better decisions in the moment, to avoid losing customers, or missing out on opportunities.
Geomant Wallboards: Mapping Success
Geomant wallboards are a comprehensive solution to informing, educating, and guiding the workforce. With Geomant wallboard software, you can give both remote and in-office agents a profile of benchmark metrics to compare themselves to each day. At the same time, supervisors and managers get a real-time view of agent performance, wherever they are.
In today’s age of remote and hybrid work, wallboards are most effective when they deliver the same insights to every worker, regardless of where they are. That’s why Geomant’s wallboard is available as more than just an Android, or Windows-based application for your office screens.
Users can also access Geomant wallboard for mobile – ideal for keeping employees productive on the move. There are also robust wallboards for the home worker, offering an easy-to-follow environment packed full of metrics, alerts, and notifications to make remote workers more independent.
Managers also get their own dedicated wallboard environment where they can stay on top of goals that might not be relevant to agents. Management can track critical metrics in real-time and gain a unified view of operations all across the dispersed workplace.
Geomant isn’t a “digital signage” solutions provider, like other wallboard creators. We work exclusively with contact centers, tailoring our technology to deliver the biggest benefits for our target market. We offer “out of the box” connectors for leading contact center software solutions from vendors like Genesys, Cisco, and Avaya – perfect for keeping costs low.
What’s more, because we’re specialists in system integration, we can handle the creation of bespoke wallboard solutions for all companies, no matter how simple or complex. Our services are even available worldwide.
The Features of a Valuable Wallboard Solution
Designed to offer the ultimate in real-time reporting solutions, Geomant wallboards support and engage your employees wherever they are. The solution offers:
- Webpages that you can embed into an iframe on an agent’s desktop
- Simplified administration with 1 application to manage all screen views
- A front-end for web views with easy customization without additional costs
- Corporate communications, videos, and PowerPoint support.
- Easy agent data administration with real-time updated information
As a complete behind-the-scenes view of your contact center performance, Geomant wallboards harvest real-time and historical data from any enterprise data environment, including files, databases, intranet sites, Excel, and custom data streams.
Our service works with all of the world’s biggest contact center technology providers and integrates with virtually any service provider offering open APIs. What’s more, the experience is available to customize for businesses of all sizes. You can present to just a handful of screens or hundreds of concurrent devices at once.
Through a drag-and-drop interface, it’s easy for business leaders to create the page of insights most likely to inspire and motivate their staff. High-impact graphics will showcase charts that make it easier to understand the performance of the company in real-time. You can even add live-streamed and recorded video or multimedia content to your monitors.
To ensure no one ever falls behind the pack, there’s even support for highly scalable cloud-based email and SMS alerting. This ensures that business leaders are always aware of which operations or agents might be struggling.
All this, and Geomant also offers access to in-queue and web callback, bots, customer surveys, multichannel chat, SMS campaigns, and voice / digital channel alignment.
Historical Data, Performance Management, and CX
Ultimately, the aim of any contact center is to bridge the gap between the customer and the business, in a way that strengthens sales opportunities, service, and brand reputation.
Performance management software allows companies to stop making assumptions about which strategies drive success, and start leveraging valuable data.
The only way for a contact center to thrive is when all employees within the environment are aligned, from agents to supervisors and team leaders. Real-time information delivered through wallboards is excellent for keeping the team motivated in any environment.
However, historical data has a role to play too.
With an aligned and integrated system, you can pull data from throughout the customer journey into one location, perfect for predictive analysis, and deeper evaluation.
The historical information collected by your performance management system will give you a long-term view of the metrics that matter most to your company. This way, you can measure how new techniques are affecting business outcomes and make decisions based on data-driven predictions.
While real-time wallboards assist businesses and their employees to rectify problems and enhance the customer experience in the moment, historical data allows for perpetual optimization and growth. As agents continue to learn from each interaction, and track their performance on wallboards, their performance should gradually improve, showing in your historical data.
The more historical data you have, the easier it is to:
- Train employees based on data-driven insights
- Create policies and best-practice guidelines for success
- Measure the long-term impact of each business change
- Demonstrate the value of investments to stakeholders
- Make decisions that genuinely benefit the business.
Use Cases for Performance Management Software
Aligning valuable metrics into a comprehensive environment for your team has countless advantages. Companies can use performance management software and wallboards to:
- Align the hybrid workforce: As the workplace continues to evolve, today’s contact center agents aren’t always active inside the office. Today’s teams need to be able to align their staff wherever they are around the same goals and expectations. Real-time wallboards in a performance management solution align all of your team members and keep them motivated.
- Improve training opportunities: Training and coaching solutions are a must-have for keeping your team as efficient and productive as possible. Historical data in a performance management system gives business leaders the data they need to create better coaching opportunities.
- Improve customer experience: One of the main benefits of performance management software is that it can have a direct impact on customer experiences. With performance data to demonstrate how certain actions and employee behaviors impact customer outcomes, business leaders can build policies and best-practice guides for success.
- Motivate and engage employees: With performance management software and wallboards, companies can provide agents with a consistent source of motivation. Gamification elements, like giving team members rewards for the best metrics, keeps staff engaged. At the same time, wallboards ensure that employees can keep an eye on their own performance and reach personal goals.
- Pave the way for innovation: Performance management software is a behind-the-scenes look into your business, and how it operates. Once you know how your end-to-end activities influence success, profit, and customer experience, it’s easier to make investments that have a direct impact on your business. A performance management tool could give you the information you need to determine whether investing in AI virtual assistants or sentiment analysis is a good idea for your team.
The use cases for performance management tools in the modern contact center are endless. From motivating the hybrid worker, to getting an end-to-end view of the increasingly complicated customer experience, anyone can benefit from the right access to data.
Performance software and wallboards take the guesswork out of discovering how team efforts drive brand growth.
Useful blogs and pages:
https://www.geomant.com/end-user-solutions/wallboards-for-contact-centres
https://www.geomant.com/blog/contact-center-wallboards-projects-guide
https://www.geomant.com/blog/contact-center-wallboards-what-info-works-best
https://www.geomant.com/blog/the-benefits-of-real-time-metrics-in-the-contact-center
