Measuring agent productivity – the easy way

[Last Updated: January 2018]

As the saying goes if you can’t measure it you can’t improve it and one of the biggest challenges a contact centre faces is the ability to measure agent productivity.

Why? Because there are so many different parameters to take into consideration when calculating an agents productivity that you are relying on consolidating stats and data from a number of different systems and sources to provide a single view of productivity.

One size doesn’t fit all – and that’s ok 

The other point to note is that different contact centres may use different stats to measure agent productivity so there is no one size fits all approach which can be applied. The key is to focus not just on the measurements you can track most easily, but ensuring your metrics are valuable, provide insight and fit in with your organisations strategic goals. Having said that there are probably some common areas which can be agreed on using service, quality and efficiency measures as a starting point.

The stats you use to measure agent productivity and why they’re a problem 

In terms of service you might look at areas such as abandoned call rate and average speed of answer, information which you may get from the telephony switch or call logging system you have in place. For quality you may focus on phone etiquette and product knowledge, relying on scores you may capture during agent evaluations in your quality monitoring system. When it comes to efficiency you may focus on measures like customer on hold times and agent occupancy requiring calculations using stats from your ACD to work out total handle time divided by total available time.

Regardless of the areas you agree to track to calculate agent productivity, if you are calculating this all manually using information gathered from multiple data sources, it can get pretty confusing and labour intensive, pretty quickly, with a chance of errors slipping in along the way that may potentially skew the data.

Taking the problem and making it go away 

If this all sounds rather familiar, the good news is that there are others out there who have managed to simplify this task by implementing performance dashboard technology to automate a lot of the laborious manual processes. This technology gathers the data you need instantly from a variety of sources including ACD’s, switches, WFM systems, CRM systems and more, to create real-time charts and performance dashboards enabling key stakeholders to make the decisions they need to make more quickly and efficiently than ever before. Not only that, it effectively provides ‘one version of the truth’ by eliminating the potential for misinterpretation of stats and can be used to support or refute what is very often just ‘anecdotal’ insights.

Placing your finger on the pulse of what’s really happening as it happens 

Gone are the days of having a single resource spending countless hours collating data, which becomes outdated as soon as it is published. Picture this instead, you have data streaming in on a dashboard tailored specifically to what you want to see. It is constantly updating as new stats are captured in real-time, giving you a real finger on the pulse of what is happening in your contact centre with your agents at that point in time.
The importance of agent productivity cannot be underestimated, because it is a true measure of how much value your agents bring to the organisation. Yes, it has been challenging in the past because it required someone to painstakingly aggregate multiple data sets into a single static spreadsheet, but this is simply no longer the case.

Don’t you owe it to your agents and your business to be able to truly show them the value they add and in a way that allows you to take instant action from real-time insights?

Contact Business Systems for more information on how our technology can help.