Top Tips for Improving Outbound Contact Center Metrics

5 minute read

Upland Admin

Improving performance and boosting efficiency are top priorities when looking at outbound contact center metrics, but what steps can be taken to ensure this happens?

Outbound contact centers are an asset for any business and can help improve sales percentages, brand awareness and overall profits. However, this is only possible if agents are working productively and prospects are consistently happy with interactions.

To ensure these goals are met, contact center leaders must have access to a detailed set of metrics, also known as key performance indicators (KPIs), so that they can accurately calculate how well their business is functioning at different levels. Though the type of data monitored can differ depending on the nature of the business, there are a few key insights every contact center manager should monitor and improve upon if they wish to be successful.

In this article, we’ll explore what steps you can take to boost the performance within your contact center.

Establish KPI Goals

Motivating your workforce is the best way to enhance agent productivity, to minimize stagnation in the workplace, and to ensure that all employees are working together as a team towards a shared goal. By setting up targets for each agent, each employee knows exactly what’s expected of them and what they must do to achieve the goals of the company.

Reward Agents

Nothing else is more effective in propelling your agents to reach their goals than a reward. After establishing what representatives’ individual goals are and what they need to do to achieve them, activating a system that rewards agents who work hard and achieve the best results is an excellent way to motivate the workforce and improve contact center metrics.

Keep Everyone on the Same Page

Though establishing a competitive team-based environment within your contact center may be an effective and healthy way to enhance agent performance, conflicting goals could hinder progress. It’s crucial to ensure that all goals within separate departments are working together in unison towards a common goal that benefits the business as a whole.

Ensure Goals are Reachable

Setting goals that test agents and push them to achieve the best of their potential is a great way to bolster metrics within your contact center – but it’s important not to be too ambitious. If agents are overstretched or overstressed, they’re much more likely to fail, and repeated failures can be devastating to a person’s confidence. It’s important to find the right balance when establishing targets so that a person can progress forward at a healthy rate.

Invest Heavily in Training

Giving your agents the best possible start by providing in-depth training during their first few weeks at the company is an effective way to help performance – but it shouldn’t end there! For the best results, training should continue throughout each agent’s career, ensuring that everyone in the contact center is up to date with the latest products and services offered by your company.

Engage in Call Monitoring

Keeping a close eye on call quality is a fundamental step towards improving contact center metrics. By monitoring calls, you can easily identify the strengths and weaknesses of agents, and detect how well customers are responding to the service they receive. As well as being a valuable tool for training agents and improving their skills, call monitoring also gives your business direct access to see how your contact center is performing on the frontline.

Form a Quality Assurance Team

Though it’s possible to hand the responsibility of agent monitoring to team leaders within your contact center, research has shown that it’s much more effective to assign the task to a dedicated group. This way, there’s no conflict of interest and quality assurance team members will review the calls of each agent impartially, irrespective of what team they belong to. The result is clear, honest results that enable your company to identify exactly who or what needs addressing, to continue achieving.

Simplify the Feedback Process

Customer feedback is a crucially important mechanism that can help your businesses find out exactly where you may be going wrong and what you must do to upgrade your service. However, if the feedback process is difficult to comprehend or too time-consuming, your customers are much less likely to answer accurately and may even skip the process altogether. Keep your system simple and make sure it’s easy for customers to share valuable information.

Invest in Cutting-Edge Technology

Solutions such as computer telephony integration (CTI) have been proven to help contact centers improve metrics on a multitude of levels. As well as improving agent productivity and customer satisfaction, this technology provides automated reports that analyze vast pools of data gathered by your contact center and digests them into easily comprehensible insights that leaders can use to achieve targets.

Listen to Employees

Though the word of the customer is undoubtedly important, it also pays to listen to what your employees have to say about your contact center, so that the environment can be developed to make their lives easier too. After all, employees that are happy work much more efficiently and productively than employees who are miserable and tired of their job. Collecting agent feedback is an effective way to ensure that employees are getting everything they need to perform at the highest rate possible and to promote the success of your organization.

Final Thoughts

In a contact center environment where a million things are going on at once, it can be hard to keep on top of things and to ensure your eye stays on the ball. By following the tips above, your outbound contact center metrics will improve significantly, which in turn will help increase profitability and ensure that customers are happy with the service they receive from your business.

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