How Monitoring Makes Life Easier for Supervisors in Call Centers

The Right Call Center Software Makes a Huge Difference

Agents contribute to the call center’s success. Even more important is the role the supervisor plays in performance improvements. It is not surprising that most or all call centers employ supervisors to monitor and manage call center agents and contribute to performance enhancements. Here, the importance of real-time analytics & reports in the call center software can make monitoring easier for supervisors and help them to help the agents and deliver results.

Supervisor’s tasks

A good supervisor needs to be a leader with expertise in communication, a high degree of empathy, and the ability to handle conflicts as well as resolve issues. A keenly analytical mind and proactive approach help to tackle a multitude of tasks. The call center software can help a great deal to make it easier if it has the right type and quality of real-time analytics & reporting function. The many burdens a supervisor has to bear:

• Allocate and distribute work to agents for outbound campaigns
• Use call center software features to define which type of call goes to which skilled agent
• Monitor calls that are blocked
• Monitor duration of incoming calls and time spent by agents on each call and outcomes
• Keep track of how long it takes an agent to respond to calls and keep track of first-call resolutions
• Analyze customer satisfaction levels referenced to agent interaction and find out capabilities of agents’ lacks and pluses.
• Be answerable to the management
• Motivate and encourage agents and resolve their problems by stepping in when and where required

Keep track, monitor, and jump in

There may be a hundred agents working to receive calls and resolve issues. It is not humanly possible for a supervisor to listen to each conversation. However, the contact center software automatically records calls and such recordings can be analyzed using the real-time analytics & reports feature. If you have AI-driven solutions, then call center monitoring becomes easier for supervisors since AI automatically keeps track of all metrics and raises a flag should it observe deviations such as agents’ frustration, callers’ frustration, lengthy duration, and so on. Supervisors can step right in and handle such flagged conversations in real-time. For call center operations to be smooth and profitable for a supervisor to do better, you would find AI powered call center software a much better option.

Classifying agents

The above is a relatively simple job. The tough challenge is for supervisors to classify agents based on a number of parameters and decide on skill sets so that inbound calls are routed to agents based on their capabilities. It can be difficult given the nature of customer issues and the personality of customers. AI & ML in analytics & reports helps by removing subjectivity and presenting an objectively assessed report of each agent referenced to topics handled. Supervisors using call center software with these advanced technologies find it easier to monitor agent performance on an ongoing basis or retrospectively through analytics of performance through call recording. And they do not have to do it manually since the AI-powered solution presents the analyzed report.

Time spent on calls and time spent on call-related duties

An agent must talk with a caller and must also resolve the issue raised leading to time spent on such duties. In such scenarios, supervisors have a tough time tracking time spent on calls, whether the call is resolved the first time around, whether the agent seeks assistance during the call, what the issue is and whether it can be resolved during the call or requires post-call work. In such cases how much time does an agent spend on the task and does it impact handling allocated volumes. It requires fine integration to balance variables and unknowns and for supervisors, this can be mind-wracking. However, if you have a smart AI solution that tracks in real-time and raises alerts on the dashboard, the life of the supervisor becomes easier. He can take corrective action in time and improve agent productivity by reducing time spent on post-call tasks.

Read Also: Top 10 Tips to Improve the Productivity of Your Call Center Agents

Assessing customer satisfaction

Here again, the variables can cloud a supervisor’s decision-making process in arriving at a satisfactory customer satisfaction level index. The issue raised may not be resolvable on the first call. Some issues are unreasonable and not within a client company’s warranty or service definitions. Customers may be argumentative or be unclear about their needs and do not provide reasonable details for the agent to take action. Who does the supervisor fault and how does one measure customer satisfaction. It becomes easier when you define algorithms in reporting and analytics section of the call center software so that it is easy for supervisors to arrive at a customer satisfaction index.

As can be seen, monitoring is necessary and is a challenge but you can make it easier for supervisors by using artificial intelligence and ML in real-time analytics and reports. Hodusoft’s contact center software incorporates AI in its solutions and that is the first step to making life easier for supervisors.