Call Center Quality Management: Identify, Reward, and Retain Your Best Agents

Ideally, you already have a team of top-notch call center agents who are at the top of their game – you work with the cream of the crop, the best of the best. They’re all confident (yet humble); they’re quick learners and can easily understand any/all technology you implement at your call center. They excel at providing world-class, exceptional customer service while maintaining maximum profitability for your company.

That might your ideal, but it’s not often reality. While not every single agent on your team is a picture-perfect employee (yet), you do have skilled and extraordinary agents in your group. To provide call center quality management consistently, you must be able to identify the skills, acknowledge the efforts, and reward the accomplishments of your best agents.

Identify the skills and character traits of exceptional agents

Great listeners

It’s impossible to learn something and talk at the same time. Your best agents know that attentively listening to their customers is key to producing the desired result, whether that’s securing a commitment of a past-due payment or selling a subscription, product, or service. If agents are constantly talking in an unenthusiastic tone or reading a script, they’re not listening.

The best car salespeople are the ones who listen to the needs, tastes, and budgets of what their customers are sharing with them, not the ones who try to fit everyone into the exact same vehicle. Your agents are salespeople — they’re selling an idea, a solution, or a product. Stellar agents know how to listen and succinctly restate the customer’s needs to make the customer at the other end of each and every conversation feel heard and understood.

Calm, cool, and collected

Yes, even during potentially volatile scenarios and when other agents lose their cool, your best agents understand that the customer isn’t frustrated with them personally, but might be experiencing some stress outside of their short conversation with your agent. Providing world-class service means being able to resolve escalated situations, provide solutions, and transform a once-dissatisfied customer into a loyal, referring one. Skilled agents are respectful and non-confrontational with customers, their colleagues, and their supervisors.

Articulate, personable, and helpful

Highly skilled call center agents speak clearly, enunciate words succinctly, can think quickly on their feet, and are pleasant to be around. They always go the extra mile to get the job done, leave things better than how they found them, and are the first ones to show an initiative and lend a hand before help is even sought. They’re natural leaders, mentors, and trainers. Others gravitate toward them because they’re pleasant to be around, bring out the best in others, and are ever-optimistic.

Reward your best agents

An integral part of providing call center quality management is understanding the importance of rewarding positive behavior. Conceptualizing and implementing ways to consistently acknowledge and reward your skilled agents will not only show you appreciate them, but also inspire the other agents on your staff to excel. Here are some ways to reward your best (and most-improved) agents at the end of each shift, each week, each month, and each quarter:

• Free gift cards for meals, gas, movies, massages, and retail stores
• Cash prizes
• Plaques, trophies, and letters of praise
• Promotions and pay increases

Retain your best agents

Keeping the best workers within your organization takes a clear strategic vision that’s well communicated across the entire company. To ensure that the top talent stays put, motivate and challenge them. Additionally, implement technology that empowers them to perform their jobs and perform them well. Advanced call center technology is one such tool that not only provides the information call center agents need to deliver at a high level, it also helps call center managers identify stellar agents through embedded reporting, analytics and other KPIs.

Finding, training and retaining super star call center agents is a challenge across the industry. However, by identifying, rewarding, challenging, and motivating those agents, you can ensure that today’s extraordinary staff members stick around to help train the stellar employees of tomorrow.

Make sure to download your free copy of the TCPA Compliance Checklist eBook to keep your agents and call center on track with the new TCPA regulations.