Pharma companies invest a lot of money, time, and resources into developing effective contact centers to improve patient and HCP experiences. Call center agents are one of the most vital components of a successful contact center, acting as your frontline in ensuring a positive customer experience.
Enhanced quality monitoring (or eQM) is an important piece of the puzzle when working to improve call center agent performance. However, most leaders tend to focus only on agents who aren’t meeting performance standards — leaving the best agents to fend for themselves. But top-performing call center agents deserve the same level of attention as their counterparts, and proactive monitoring of your best agents can result in an improved patient experience and a more efficient contact center.
Great managers are also great coaches.
Behind every Beyoncé and LeBron is a coach who helped them hone their skills to become top performers in their craft. No matter the arena — be it a football stadium or a contact center — a coach can be the difference between someone being just good and being great.
According to Harvard Business Review, coaching and providing learning opportunities for your top call center agents can have a number of positive benefits for your company, including recruiting and retaining top talent who gravitate toward a strong, collaborative manager. Enhanced quality monitoring offers a comprehensive look at agent performance to develop actionable insights for improvement, giving your agents the tools they need to be successful.
As you monitor performance to identify learning opportunities for the future, below are three things to keep in mind when evaluating your quality monitoring program.
Monitoring and coaching your top call center agents has the biggest business impact.
Economist Vilfredo Pareto introduced the Pareto principle, which states that 80% of results come from 20% of participants. The same idea can apply to your contact center where the top tier of call center agents produce the majority of your best results.
Taking a strategic approach to enhanced quality monitoring allows your coaches to better utilize their time to drive more impactful results when working with call center agents. You certainly want to monitor and coach every agent regardless of performance, but investing in your top performers can lead to a larger return on investment. Even a small improvement in the best agents has the potential to yield significant results in customer satisfaction.
Soft skills are just as important for compliance.
After reviewing thousands of contact center interactions between pharma sales agents and customers, we discovered that agents who consistently scored greater than 90% on the soft skill of “Demonstrated empathy” were 5% more likely to properly identify and handle potential adverse events.
While 5% may seem small, it can mean the difference between passing a regulatory inspection and failing. As such, monitoring call center agent performance on soft skills like empathy is just as important as making them aware of protocols and guidelines.
Training your best agents to incorporate empathy and active listening into customer interactions facilitates a more positive sentiment towards your company. And through enhanced quality monitoring, you can draw important insights about empathetic words, phrases, and tone from these interactions to create training resources for all of your agents.
Check in with your best agents to avoid burnout.
At the end of the day, your best agents are still human. As more call center agents work remotely and handle an influx of calls and other digital interactions, the possibility of burnout increases. In fact, 74% of call center agents are at risk for burnout.
According to the CEO Daily from Fortune, most contact center leaders expect work-from-home policies to stay in place long after the pandemic is under control, ushering in new concerns about the negative toll remote work takes on both agent performance and customer experience.
Enhanced quality monitoring can be the first line of defense in protecting your agents and customers from the workplace effects of COVID-19. Contact center leaders can stay ahead of negative trends and course correct each agent’s performance to produce top results on key metrics, such as first contact resolution or customer satisfaction. With 94% of call center agents agreeing that learning opportunities reduce their chances of leaving a job, proactive monitoring can help keep your best agents on your team.
Learn how our Sales Accelerator helps you monitor your contact center agents and identify areas for growth to drive business impact with.