Resources Library Agent Performance Report

As much as the growth of your business is the litmus to success of your strategy, most businesses falter and stagnate after the first spell of exponential growth. While trying to understand why such a trend has become common sight in recent times, most of the analysis points towards dwindling customer satisfaction. Unhappy customers eventually cause a significant amount of churn. One of the best ways to keep customers consistently satisfied is to make sure that the agents helping them don’t lose interest and motivation at work. While there may be a dozen reasons why agents don’t perform their best, as a call center admin, you need to constantly identify the bottlenecks and motivate your agents on the big picture and how, what they do is a great value add. And the best way to do this is by giving them constant feedback and guidance to become better versions of themselves month over month with their performance metrics.

Microsoft’s 2017 State of Global Customer Service Report says that, “26% of customers are irritated when a representative doesn’t have the knowledge or ability to resolve an issue.”

Agents are the ones in direct dialogue with customers day in and day out. This makes it important to set high standards for the quality of call experience that they deliver. By doing so, the standard of the entire team of call center agents can be kept at par with the expectations of your business. To make sure that call center teams using Freshdesk Contact Center can perform to their fullest and the admins can make data-backed enhancements to their business strategy, we’ve put together a ready-to-use Agent Performance report within the “Curated Reports” section of the dashboard. The points below explain each metric within this report and give you an idea of how to interpret the data on your dashboard.

Call Distribution by Agents

Since the biggest challenge faced by any call center is the volume of calls that need to be handled, the number of calls that an agent attends to is a basic but important metric of performance. This report gives you (the admin) a clear idea of the number of incoming and outgoing calls that were answered by each agent.

Call Distribution by Agents

How to interpret this metric

From this report, analyze the ratio of the number of incoming to outgoing calls for the month. Now look at the agents who have handled the most incoming and outgoing calls respectively. More importantly, identify the ones who fall short of meeting the set targets of the average number

  • The possible reason for some of the agents performing better than the rest could be that they spend lesser time per call, keep each call precise, and move on to the next call quickly.
  • The agents who have answered the least number of tickets might be slower because they spend too much time on a given call or have limited knowledge of the product.
How to act upon your insights

The active agents are the ones who need some form of acknowledgement to help them feel valued and keep up their current pace

  • Incentivize the most active agents with gift cards or acknowledge them during team huddles.
  • For the ones who aren’t contributing enough, ask them not to spend more than a certain period of time on a given call. Also suggest some ways for them to learn the product or service more thoroughly.

Unanswered Calls by Agents

The least that is expected by a customer is for their call to be answered. This report gives you an idea of how many calls went unanswered for a month by each agent. While this metric is primarily used to assess an agent’s efficiency, you can use data across agents to gauge the performance of your entire support center.

Unanswered Calls by Agents

How to interpret this metric

The data from this report is certainly indicative of how much you respect your customer’s happiness

  • By analyzing this data, you can identify the agents who have the most number of unanswered calls.
  • You can now sit them down, understand why they tend to miss a large chunk of calls.
How to act upon your insights

Now that you’ve understood the roadblock with respect to an unhealthy number of missed calls, you need to act on this feedback by helping your agents attend more calls

  • Give all agents a common maximum threshold for the number calls that they can afford to miss in a month. This way you’ll sound accommodative and at the same time gradually make them conscious when they miss answering a call. A study by Telux on the Impact of Missed calls on UK SMEs shows that,“Businesses in the United Kingdom lose over £30 billion every single year due to missed calls.”
  • Restructure your business hours and customize your IVR and call queues to route calls more efficiently keeping in mind the demand per department, team size, and call distribution for each agent (use insights from the previous metric).

Speed of Answer by Agents

This report on the speed of answer sets the context for how long it takes on an average for each agent to pick their calls.

How to interpret this metric

The speed at which an agent attends to a call is a great indicator of the quality of your phone support for a customer. The less time you take to answer a call, the more interested you look to solve a customer’s problem

  • Let’s say it’s a busy hour of the day and close to a dozen customers are waiting in queue to be answered. In this scenario it’s important to ramp up and quickly answer the calls and not keep your customer waiting for long.
  • There could be a possibility that the agent is unaware when a call comes in.
How to act upon your insights

Now that you know the bottlenecks that are bringing down the efficiency of your customer service, you need to work out some quick fixes

  • Check if you have enabled the call notifications in Freshdesk Contact Center. Sometimes, the general ad blocker and pop-up restrictions of the agent’s browser might stop the notifications from being active for an agent.
  • Have a one-on-one conversation with the agent where you understand if they are spending a lot of time on after call work like adding notes and logging in details of the call. Opting for a call center solution that automatically logs calls is a smart way of ensuring quick responses.

Unanswered Transfers by Agents

When an agent is unable to solve a customer’s query, they might need to transfer the call to another agent with the expertise to address that query. This report helps you identify the number of transferred calls that went unattended by the second agent (i.e., the agent to whom calls were transferred).

How to interpret this metric
  • If the number of transferred calls that were not answered is almost similar for each agent, it means that all agents are tied to some call or the other at all times. Their plate is always full throughout the day.
  • Or maybe the agent is trying to make note of the previous call details, but is unaware of the After Call Work status. They might have simply overridden their After Call Work status and been online.
How to act upon your insights
  • Share the report with those agents who haven’t been actively attending to the transfers and give them a reality check on how their other teammates strike a good balance between direct and transferred calls.
  • Educate them on the use of After Call Work status.

Call Distribution by Groups

This report helps you understand the count of incoming and outgoing calls that were handled by each team for the month. For example, if you have one group of agents handling calls about shipping and another group attending to billing related queries, you can compare the volume of calls made and received by each group.

How to interpret this metric
  • The team that is taking more calls might be extremely well-structured and well-informed about the product so that they can quickly answer the queries and move on to more calls.
  • Or, they may be receiving too many calls and are on the verge of an agent burnout.
How to act upon your insights
  • If a certain team is seen to ace through handling a large percentage of calls as opposed to other teams, discuss and take the learnings from the better team and share it with the other teams to help them improve.
  • Restructure your team count if necessary to spread out the workload for more efficiency. You can move some agents from the department that receives lesser calls to a department where the call volume is high.

Handle Time by Agents

This report helps you know how well your agents manage their time while on a call. Handling a call precisely will help an agent answer more calls without compromising on the quality. Thus this metric gives you a clear picture on the efficiency of the agents.

Handle Time by Agents

How to interpret this metric
  • This is an important measure of how well your agents know the product.
  • This is also a clear indication of how updated they are with the product and how well they understand the customer queries and the best ways to address these requests.
How to act upon your insights
  • Setting up a product demo and engaging them in an exercise on common FAQs of the product can help them ramp up in terms of their product knowledge and lessen handle time = attending more calls.
  • Also you can streamline a regular and much better channel to communicate the product updates.

Hold Time by Agents

Most customers connect with your business over a phone call because they are pressed for time and need their problems sorted as soon as possible. And keeping them on hold for long in such a situation is not a very smooth call experience for your customer. The Call Center KPI survey by Velaro reiterates this where it says “Close to 60% of customers lose patience if they are put on hold for more than a minute.” The Freshdesk Contact Center Agent Performance report considers this an important metric and helps you identify the agents who put their calls on hold for long.

How to interpret this metric
  • The agents who put callers on hold for long might not know the product as well as they are expected to.
  • They eventually tend to look it up or take help from colleagues to come up with a solution to a customer’s problem.
How to act upon your insights

Customers don’t like being put on hold.

  • So equipping the agents with a product training to bridge any knowledge gap can help them slowly reduce their hold time. You can also incorporate customized greetings and call back options to make the best use of the hold time as a brand engagement activity.
  • The agent might not be aware of the resources like knowledge base, FAQ docs, and other supporting collaterals. Sharing a curated folder to all agents can help them avoid putting a call on hold for long.

After Call Work Time by Agents

In this report you get to see how much time an agent spends after a call in capturing important call details and highlights. This might include raising a ticket for another agent to follow-up, adding a discount code to the customer’s account, or leaving a note for any agent who might interact with this customer in future.

After Call Work Time by Agents

How to interpret this metric
  • The agents with a higher average time spent on After Call Work, tend to have high intention of following up with the customer later.
  • The ones who spend very little time after a call might not be taking note of the important details of the call. They could be missing out on important, useful call highlights that helps make the follow up more efficient.
How to act upon your insights
  • If you see certain agents having an abnormally low After Call Work time, either they are unaware or are unmotivated to update the details of a call for further follow up. Talk to them and emphasize the purpose and importance of this feature.
  • As an admin, you can keep a cap on the time that your agent spends on updating the details after a call by setting a fixed After Call Work time. This way, you have control over how long your agents spend on updating the call details. Also, in case your agents need more time after a call, you can contact support@freshcaller.com to extend the After Call Work time for your account.

To know more about other curated reports, check out our solution article or this overview. If you want a customised demo of the reports feature, drop us a mail at hello@freshcaller.com. We’ll be more that happy to get you onboard.