THE CALL

CENTER
AGENT

OTEK BUSINESS CENTRE OTEK ST. BAGUIO CITY

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THE CALL CENTER AGENT
Agent/Customer Service Representative is the person who interacts with the customer
in a contact center. Since these centers are the company’s first line of contact with
current and future customers, appropriate training of the contact center staff can
have an enormous impact on customers’ loyalty and satisfaction and companies can
minimize the risk of losing a valued customer because of service defects.
Here are some skills which are imperative in an agent:
1. Soft skills: A combination of excellent written and spoken English with a pleasing
personality. An agent should have an understanding of the customer’s culture,
problems as well as that of the product he/she is representing and must possess basic
computer application skills with fairly good typing speed.

2. Versatility: Since an agent comes across many calls and many customers every
day, versatility of approach, of handling diverse needs of different customers should
be a basic trait to be demonstrated. An agent should be able to modify his/her
behavioral style in order to work successfully with others. This adaptive attitude will
not only increase customer satisfaction but will also help in breaking monotony of
calling.

AGENT ATTRIBUTES
1. Loves interacting with people: Since the position of contact center agent requires
talking to people most of the time, a person aspiring to be one should have this basic
trait to be able to enjoy the work and should be able to communicate confidently and
effectively.
2. Maintains high standards of professional ethics: An agent is in charge of
confidential information pertaining to client and its customers which should not be
disclosed to any unrelated party under whatever circumstances.
The agent should be fully aware of his powers regarding negotiating, discounting,
disputing, or waiving off any charge or promising something which he/she is not
supposed to, while interacting with the customer. The agent should strictly follow the
client directions, policies and guidelines in order to avoid misleading the customer in
any way.
3. Is a team-member: Contact centers are the best grooming grounds for leaders, and
every leader starts the journey by being a competent team player. Every agent should
strive to be responsive and sensitive about his/her peers. Best practices sharing and
peer-advice should be used as an informal tool to achieve self-excellence.
4. Respects an individual’s right: An agent respects an individual’s right to privacy
and uninterrupted leisure time with regards to calling in odd hours. Although there
are rules and laws governing this issue, every agent should strive to observe them as
well.
5. Identifies well with clients values: An agent represents the client while
interacting with the customer when he/she is not the direct employee of the client.
There exists a fiduciary relationship between the client and the agent in such a case
as the customer of rhe client believes that he is interacting with somebody at the

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client’s end. An agent’s most cherished quality is to imbibe and pass on the client’s or
the employer’s value on to the customer.
6. Is a positive thinker and high on learning: Contact centers are a part of a very
dynamic industry, CRM where customer behavior is driven by many factors acting in
unison. An agent must be able to analyze the trends and address them so as to affect
the nature of work in a positive way. One should have a keen learning attitude and
seek opportunity in every sphere of activity. Borrowing and imbibing best practices to
achieve higher productivity levels form an integral part of a successful agent’s
personality.
7. Admits one’s mistake: In a contact center where individuals work as team
members and everybody works in tandem on a common database, mistakes are bound
to happen and be pointed out. However, admitting one’s mistake and taking care that
it should not be repeated in future is a commendable quality of an agent. Passing the
buck around or taking feedback in a negative way adversely affects the team
atmosphere.

PERFORMANCE METRICS
 The most important tool for quantifying agent efficiency is monitoring. An
agent is closely monitored while at work. This may be with or without his/her
knowledge. Further, it can be screen monitoring or talk monitoring, this
monitoring is an important tool for managers/ supervisors to assess the quality
of calls, identify and take care of any issue which amounts to
miscommunication, malpractice or any functional error. Every agent is
provided with a feedback regarding these aspects. Some quantitative
parameters include percentage of time agents actually spend on the phone;
productivity goals such as contacts per hour and promises/sales per hour;
collection goals such as the number of dollars collected per month; and the
agent’s quality monitoring scores.

 A contact center manager has expressed his views on agent assessment as

“contact centers are multifaceted, it’s when you analyze a combination of all
of these factors that you see your real stars rise to the top. You know that
agents aren’t sacrificing one goal for another.”

 Measuring performance for a contact center operation is essential to the

overall success and requires tracking skills. The top management has to
determine strategic measurement and operation goals, establish real-world
performance targets, and develop an effective system for contact center
measurement needs.

 There are both external and internal performance measurements for contact
centers. External measurement areas include the overall satisfaction level
experienced by the customer, his willingness to recommend a
company/product to a friend, and his likelihood to repurchase or to do business
with a company in the future.

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  Internal performance measurements can again be both qualitative and
quantitative. Qualitative measurements include product awareness and
knowledge and chain of command for issues beyond the agent’s experience or
control. Quantitative measurements include maximum delay time, abandoned
calls, average talk times, after call work time, and value or revenue per call. In
addition, cost of hiring, initial training costs, ongoing training cost, turnover
rates, employee job satisfaction, and sales conversion ratios must be
considered when establishing performance measurements. An effective
evaluation for any call center must include both external and internal
performance measurements and should lead to satisfied customers.

 Performance of an agent is done on a daily basis which might come as an MIS

report or in any form of statistical dashboard. Some quantitative productivity
measuring tools with reference to the different contact functionality are as
follows:
Customer care:
■ Number of clients/product/portfolios handled.
■ Average customers handled.
■ Average talk time.
■ Number of escalations.
Telemarketing:
■ Number of calls made.
■ Number of sales made.
■ Number of lead generation/referrals. Collections:
■ Number of accounts worked.
■ Revenue per call.
■ Total promises taken.
■ Number/Percentage of promises kept.
■ Number of disputes reported.

AGENT SCORECARD

 An effective performance management system ensures that a balanced call

center scorecard is used to measure the efficiency and productivity of call
center agents.

 Call centers are used or hired by businesses as a means of interaction with

customers. Some of the businesses are utility companies, banks, mail order
catalog firms and computer hardware manufacturers. A call center may be an
inbound or outbound company. Inbound call centers receive calls from
customers who may need assistance or information about a certain product or
service. Outbound call centers, on the other hand, make outgoing calls to
potential customers.

 Most management of call centers are faced with the dilemma of balancing cost
effectiveness and service levels. Generally, callers do not want to wait for a
long time for somebody to answer their calls so, it is important for call center
management to hire an adequate number of agents. In the same way,
management also recognizes the need to minimize the number of hired agents

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 since their salaries make up seventy percent of all call center costs. Given this
dilemma, it is vital for call centers to optimize the productivity of their agents
and other resources.

 Traditionally, call centers use various telecommunication forecasting

techniques to determine the number of agents that are required in a certain
period of time. These methods are used to predict call traffic intensity in any
given hour. For forecasting purposes, historical data and trends may be
analyzed. They also take into account typical customer behavior especially
when their calls get queued. Most performance management systems employed
in call centers used to exclusively focus on performance measures such as
average talk time, average handling time, the number of calls handled per hour
and the time of delay while a caller waits for somebody to receive his call.

 Today, there is a shift of priorities where call center managers are concerned.
In the past, much weight is given on talk times and handling times and were
considered the ultimate measure of agent performance. More and more call
centers now recognize the need to monitor overall call center performance
based on key performance indicators (KPI). These indicators are generally
based on corporate goals. Effective utilization of KPIs will allow management
to track and predict agent performance. Likewise, these will also be useful in
the identification, diagnosis and resolution of performance problems.

 In aggregate, a call center scorecard measures and determines its overall

performance. In the call center industry, a single measure of call center
performance is the Balanced Score. It is critical in determining this score,
metrics such as cost per call, customer satisfaction, first contact resolution
(FCR) rate, agent utilization and aggregate call center performance should be
taken into account. By regularly monitoring the Balanced Score, it becomes
easier for stakeholders to determine whether or not the performance of a call
center is declining or improving over time. Should there be a need to prescribe
actions to improve performance; this score would help management identify
which areas to improve on. Finally, used scorecard will help to improve and
control call-center performance.