How to Embed Analytics into the Contact Center

For many years, contact centers have strived to enable agents to manage their own performance and own their learning and development. As work-from-home and hybrid work models become the new norm, the business case for agent empowerment has become more compelling.

At our recent Interactions Live conference, one company that provides credit management services to many of the largest credit grantors in Africa detailed how it used newly discovered trends and insights collected from an analytics solution to enable coaching using a skills framework and a digital performance dashboard.

Debt collection is a highly regulated industry, and the company wanted to understand how 1,500 agents are performing on 350,000 calls each day—a tall order with two-thirds of them working remotely. Not one of those 350,000 debtors likes getting a debt collection call.

For many years, the company evaluated calls randomly and used basic data to monitor and understand agent performance, but this process had several drawbacks:

• Manually tracking and reporting evaluations was time-consuming.

• Scoring was subjective and inconsistent.

• Managers found it hard to identify strengths and weaknesses of individual agents, teams and branches.

• The process focused on compliance, not coaching.

Then, three years ago, the company embedded analytics into its processes and realized immediate results. Using Nexidia Analytics, the company was able to:

• Score 100% of calls automatically.

• Unlock unparalleled insights and intelligence pertaining to agents.

• Enable objective and consistent scoring.

• Provide many different reporting options for results.

Developing a Framework for Change

While the new capabilities unlocked new insights into agent performance, the company still had no way to change agent behavior. The company decided to develop a four-step roadmap:

1. Develop a skills framework—an inventory of all the skills required of agents. One of the benefits of a skills framework is that it creates a common skills language for agents, managers, and trainers. Developing the framework helped the company:

• Clearly define categories: compliance, customer service, effectiveness, efficiency and risk.
• Define specific goals within each category, such as adherence to business processes.
• Identify the skills that contribute to each business goal, such as keeping voicemails and no-connect calls to under 30 seconds to increase efficiency.
• Define clear mastery thresholds, so agents and supervisors know exactly what mastery means and when to move onto another skill.
• Prioritize skills. Agents can’t be expected to master all the required skills simultaneously—instead, they should be working on two or three of the most important.

2. Provide a digital dashboard to organize and display the data. This aligned the organization around a single version of the truth and enabled agents to compare their performance to that of their peers. It also enabled agents to understand how their actions contribute to the organization’s overall performance.
3. Provide targeted correctional coaching in the form of digital documentation to enable agents to manage their own performance and own their own learning and development. With two-thirds of its agents working from home, centralized documentation helped improve coaching and communication.
4. Introduce gaming elements to make learning more engaging. The company found that agents began to compete among themselves, driving improvement.

With analytics embedded into the contact center and a framework to effect change, the company was able to move from simply measuring compliance to using insights to deliver better coaching and drive business results. It is now able to:

• Give agents a 360-degree view of their performance.

• Highlight individual agents’ strengths and weaknesses.

• Simplify the ongoing rollout and embedding of newly discovered insights and measurements.

• Enhance communication of specific, clear, demonstrable metrics and expectations for success.

• Ensure that the agents are aligned with key business goals.

• Deliver a consistent standard of coaching and create a level playing field.

The company found that by making expectations for success clearly visible, change management became much easier. Learn more about how the company drove improvements by watching the full Interactions Live session discussion, “Embedding Analytics into the Contact Center with a Digital Dashboard.”