Real-Time Performance Dashboards for Agents

Show Me (All) the Money: Why Agents Need Real-Time Access to Pay and Performance

To become faster, runners use fitness watches to track their cadence, mileage, heart rate, and other metrics to evaluate their progress. With a quick glance at the wrist, runners know how they performed and are inspired to do better, be it by adjusting stride length or upping the pace.

Now, think. What if you could create a similar experience for your teams of agents? No running shoes required.

To keep your agents on track, motivated and self-assured, they need the opportunity to review and understand their pay and performance in real-time. A performance dashboard provides your agents with current and past interaction data, including rankings, feedback, and compliance scoring. With this knowledge, agents are better equipped to go the extra mile for your customers and are more motivated to improve their performance and payouts.

Likewise, a compensation dashboard is extremely beneficial. Bonuses, free time, overtime, and other perks are viewable so that agents understand that there’s much more to their paychecks than just base wage. The compensation dashboard leads agents to stick around longer and is also a unique benefit to showcase while recruiting.

iQor recently implemented our own agent performance and compensation dashboard through our proprietary business intelligence tool. Through our own learning experience, we’ve cracked some codes on a few key differentiators we think will spark life back into your agents – especially when dealing with stale performance, attrition, or growing apathy.

Quick Note on Metrics

When it comes to choosing dashboard metrics, the key is to provide visibility into what matters most to your agents and review them frequently. In our contact centers, we never go full year without a review. And thanks to having their own set of tools to supplement these face-to-face interactions, agents go into meetings and coaching sessions as better communicators and problem-solvers.

1. Keep Agents Longer with a Compensation Dashboard

Through iQor’s personalized ‘Qompensation’ Dashboard, agents can view and track recent pay periods and see a full year-to-date snapshot. The compensation dashboard gives a complete picture, including associated bonuses and benefits that agents either are or could be receiving. With a clear status of their money (and its potential), your agents are more likely to stick around longer, and less likely to leave for a seemingly menial pay increase.

Here is an example breakdown of a total compensation package:

• Company medical
• Overtime
• Free time pay
• Bonus
• Cash incentives (including non-cash incentives such as gift cards, electronics, and other tangible items), contests, or direct recognition
• Referral bonuses
• Company-provided compensation (may include retroactive pay, bereavement, jury duty, etc.)

Sharing this Total Compensation Dashboard with the Agents as part of a larger Retention project helped decreased Annual Attrition rates across the company by over 12%.

2. Drilldown to Details for More Accountability and Collaboration

Provide agents with the ability to go beyond seeing summary level key performance indicator scores (KPIs) by allowing them to drill further into the context of the interaction and feedback that a customer or quality analyst gave them.

Allow agents to see the outcome from the customer’s viewpoint (i.e., how the customer defines quality) in the context of important company metrics. This opportunity for detail fosters an environment of self-learning, accountability, and more engaging and impactful discussions with managers.

For example, your agent dashboard may provide more drill-able insights on the following:

• First call resolution (FCR) score
• Survey response
• Call category/type
• Customer inquiry history

A drilled-down report of a low FCR score may include a survey response. The customer may have simply said, “The agent didn’t know how to solve my problem.” Not very helpful on its own. But when it’s paired with the right information on the type of call and customer’s inquiry history, the agent then has all the necessary information to pinpoint the underlying issue. In this case, it could be that the script or handbook is actually missing the solution to that specific topic. The agent can then bring this to the manager’s attention to resolve and ensure that the program’s training material, scripting, and knowledge bases are updated accordingly. Future frustration averted.

3. Integrate Interaction Analytics to Build Trust

Move beyond traditional KPIs and indexes by integrating interaction (voice, email, chat, social) analytics with drill-able insights. Metrics such as dead air, customer sentiment, escalations, and compliance are extremely beneficial to front-line agents and can serve as an immediate learning experience.

iQor allows agents to drill down into flagged interactions using our interactions analytics. Allowing agents to listen to or read these interactions drives self-correcting behavior and builds trust between the agent, QA team, and leadership. With the full story clear to all parties, agents are less likely to question negative customer feedback presented at review sessions or quality assurance meetings. Engagement will be higher and agents will be more open to discussing improvement strategies.

4. Create Friendly Competition with an Agent Performance Scorecard

Incorporating front-line voice of customer (VOC) data and a well-rounded scorecard allows agents to see the impact they are making in real-time.

Your performance dashboard may easily provide agents with any one or all of the views below:

• Personal performance vs. company goal
• Personal performance vs. team averages
• Personal performance vs. peers

This type of intel isn’t new to the agent, but seeing positive and negative feedback outside a coaching session or performance review drives employees to improve, compete with themselves and others, and gives them the chance to recognize other top performers.

Final Thoughts

Customer service agents are the face of your brand, but sometimes they need help in keeping pace and understanding how you and your customers define a quality relationship. Like a runner to their fitness watch, the right level of transparency will inspire agents to perform better. They will be more driven to break their own personal records by improving personal accountability and self-motivation – leading them to stick around longer and shift the call floor culture for the better.

Click here to learn more about iQor’s performance dashboards, business intelligence, and CX analytics can work for you.