Highlights:
- Agent monitoring is vital for the health of contact center operations.
- The entire contact center (including supervisors, agents, and customers) benefit from agent monitoring.
- Choosing contact center solutions that include agent monitoring capability is the best way to ensure agent monitoring is done seamlessly.
Your contact center is the first department to which customers turn when they have issues. How do you know if agents are solving customer problems and addressing concerns? The answer lies in agent monitoring.
This post explores the ways in which agent monitoring benefits the entire contact center, including supervisors, the agents themselves, and customers.
Why agent monitoring matters
Nearly two-thirds of contact centers already monitor agent interactions with customers, with another 32% planning on archiving voice call data in the next two to five years. Here’s why: agent interactions with customers provide a wealth of data to supervisors, such as:
- How long an agent spends on interactions
- How an agent handles customers (especially during difficult interactions)
- Whether an agent takes advantage of upsell opportunities
- How agents perform relative to their peers
By monitoring agents’ interactions with customers, you gain deeper insights into your contact center operations, which can provide benefits for agents, supervisors, customers, and your contact center as a whole.
Benefits for agents
Agent monitoring provides a number of benefits for agents, but perhaps the two most important ones are performance improvement and the ability to seize upselling opportunities.
Performance improvement
How do you know if agents deliver a delightful customer experience? You don’t, unless you monitor their interactions with customers.
Through agent monitoring, supervisors can listen in on calls as well as review on-screen and video interactions. Agent monitoring gives supervisors deeper insight into how agents handle customers. With that in mind, supervisors can create personalized coaching strategies to help agents do their best on the job.
Seize upselling opportunities
While creating an excellent customer experience is critical in a contact center, it’s also important to seize upselling opportunities.
Let’s say Tara just bought a new coffee machine. She has an issue with it, so she reaches out to the contact center. The agent is able to solve her problem quickly, and the conversation ends. While it’s great that the agent brought the problem to a quick resolution, he could have mentioned to Tara that the company sells her favorite flavor of coffee – in fact, it’s on sale at the moment.
Agent monitoring helps supervisors identify upselling opportunities. That information enables them to train agents better to leverage upselling and boost company revenue.
Benefits for supervisors
Supervisors benefit from agent monitoring because:
- They gain deeper insights into contact center operations
- Agent monitoring enables workforce optimization
- Agent monitoring leads to enhanced workforce management
Supervisors gain deeper insights into contact center operations
Agent monitoring gives supervisors deeper insights into contact center operations. When supervisors monitor all agent interactions with customers, they understand how long it takes to handle customer requests, how agents deal with difficult situations, and what the customer experience really is.
With that information, supervisors can develop a plan to improve the contact center so it’s more efficient and offers a better customer experience.
Workforce optimization
Workforce optimization refers to optimizing employee performance and engagement. Agent monitoring makes workforce optimization possible.
By understanding what takes place during interactions with customers, managers can identify which agents need individual coaching to improve performance. Additionally, managers learn which agents are performing very well, so those agents can be rewarded appropriately.
Enhanced workforce management
“Workforce management” means that decision makers manage things like human resources, workforce planning, leave management, and workforce analytics.
Agent monitoring contributes to better workforce management. By monitoring agents, supervisors understand which agents are performing well and which agents have developed specific skill sets (such as being experts at handling returns). This helps them schedule the right agents at the right time, so the contact center is always adequately staffed with agents best-suited to handle customer concerns.
Benefit for customers
The clearest benefit of agent monitoring for customers is a better customer experience.
When supervisors review agent interactions with customers, they can see what’s going well and what isn’t. Maybe there’s an agent who needs to learn how to de-escalate situations with customers, or perhaps simply doesn’t have the right knowledge to help the customer solve the problem.
Agent monitoring leads to coaching and guidance for agents that need extra support. With coaching, they can go on to improve and deliver a much better customer experience.
Benefits for the entire contact center
The entire contact center benefits from agent monitoring because it leads to:
- Greater efficiency
- Higher conversion rates
- Higher customer satisfaction
- The contact center delivering greater value to the organization
Greater efficiency
Agent monitoring can reveal inefficiency within a contact center. Maybe it’s taking agents too long to handle interactions, or interactions aren’t being routed to the right agent.
As mentioned earlier, agent monitoring gives supervisors deeper insights into contact center operations. This knowledge helps them develop strategies to improve contact center efficiency.
Higher conversion rates
A contact center can actually be a revenue center when agents understand how to seize upselling opportunities. However, they can only do that if they’re trained to do so.
Agent monitoring shows supervisors what upselling opportunities exist, so they can train agents to recognize them and leverage them.
Higher customer satisfaction
When supervisors carry out agent monitoring, they learn which agents need more training (and which agents are high-performers). They can provide individual coaching to those agents, or encourage those who are exemplars. As a result, customers are more satisfied, because they deal with well-trained agents who can deliver a positive customer experience.
The contact center delivers greater value to the organization
At many companies, the contact center can be seen as a necessary evil. However, agent monitoring boosts revenue, efficiency, and customer satisfaction. That makes the contact center valuable and highly necessary.
Monitor agents effectively with RingCentral’s contact center software
RingCentral’s contact center software enables effective, accurate agent monitoring to drive value to your organization. To learn more, get a demo.
Originally published Jun 02, 2021, updated Aug 06, 2024
