THE

CALL
CENTE
R
AGENT

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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.

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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

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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

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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.