Can you say for certain that your remote employees are as effective as in-office agents? One study on remote work revealed that over 20% of businesses are concerned that at-home agents will suffer with poor productivity. It makes sense that this could be a problem, as home agents have various distractions to get in their way, like pets, household tasks, and kids.
However, as many companies discovered during the 2020 pandemic, a work from home workforce doesn’t necessarily mean inefficiency. Remote teams can be up to 35% more productive than their counterparts too, benefiting from better work/life balance and job satisfaction.
The key to ensuring that your team is benefiting from a remote landscape, is measuring the right metrics, and collecting valuable information. So, which metrics do you need to track?
Average Abandonment Rate
You know you want to deliver incredible customer service, but it’s hard to do that if your customers aren’t sticking around for long enough for your agents to help them. If your team members are too overwhelmed in the office or trying to deal with too many calls at once, then it may be taking too long for them to get back to the customers they have on hold.
Checking your average abandonment rate won’t tell you much about the individual needs and skills of each agent, but it will tell you plenty about agent productivity. If the call abandonment rate is too high in your business, then you might need to look into why this is.
Are you routing calls effectively? How do you make it easy for your agents to jump from one call to the next as quickly as possible? Do you have a CRM system integrated into your contact centre so that your agents can access information about a customer immediately?
Average Queue Time
This is a similar metric to call abandonment because it also highlights how long your customers are generally waiting around in a queue. Average queue time shows you how much time your customers need to spend in your queue before they can actually speak to an agent that’s capable of helping them.
If your customers are waiting in line for too long, then there are various steps you can take to eliminate the problem. Use IVR and virtual agent systems to help customers answer their own questions while they wait. Consider using a call-back feature so you can reach clients when an agent is available. Alternatively, just invest in more agents to thin out the queue.
Average Handling Time
Handling time has been an important metric in the contact centre and customer engagement landscape for quite some time now. This is the average time it takes for the agent to solve a problem or disconnect the call after they answer the phone.
Average handling time can be a tricky metric to measure correctly. If the agent spends too long to deal with a query, the problem could be that they’re struggling with requests from customers that they don’t fully understand. If the average handling time is too short for the agent, this could mean that they’re not offering the right assistance, so your customers are just giving up. The key to success is comparing the “average handle time” to the general satisfaction rate of your customers.