What enables high-performing support teams to maintain exceptional service quality? How do they consistently deliver personalized and timely support? There is a reason top support teams never miss a beat. Their secret? A strategic agent scorecard.
Agent scorecard guides businesses towards a path of customer service excellence by measuring key agent performance metrics. Without the scorecard, your support team is like a ship navigating uncharted waters with no map.
Picture Jimmy, a support agent, starts his day with hundreds of tickets. He resolved many queries with utmost proficiency, but without a scorecard, we do not know if Jimmy was able to address the issues in the first go or keep the average handle time within set limits. An agent scorecard eliminates such guesswork. It not only helps you measure your agent’s performance but also helps you identify their skill or knowledge gaps.
In this blog, we will understand why a scorecard is an essential tool for your business, how to create one, and which metrics to measure to get the best out of your agents.
Also read: Empowering Support Agents And Optimizing Their Workloads: The Winning Equation
Why does your business need an agent scorecard?
Improving agent performance can feel like an uphill battle for some businesses because they fail to align their customer service objectives with their support team’s strengths. And businesses that excel at customer support use a scorecard to set clear service standards and goals.
A performance evaluation tool such as an agent scorecard includes a combination of quantitative and qualitative metrics to maximize agent performance. Businesses can set key performance indicators (KPIs) to track and benchmark agent performance. This enables them to understand what kind of training or improvements are required to foster a culture of continuous improvement. It doesn’t stop at just performance evaluation. A scorecard also promotes a better sense of accountability within agents, as it requires them to meet specific quality standards while handling customer queries.
Inside the scorecard: Metrics for support agent success
An agent scorecard offers a structured framework to include key responsibilities of your support team. Two most important areas in customer service—agent performance and service quality—have to be considered in order to set the relevant metrics. Let’s look at the essential metrics that should be included in the scorecard.
Agent efficiency and productivity metrics
- Average handle time (AHT): This metric includes an agent’s talk time, hold time, and after-call work when they are involved in a customer interaction.
- First response time (FRT): The clock to measure FRT starts when a customer first submits their query and stops when an agent provides their initial response.
- Average resolution time (ART): This is an important agent performance KPI that measures the average amount of time it takes for an agent to resolve a query from the time it is opened to when it is closed.
- Tickets closed/handled per agent (per day/hour): The raw volume of customer interactions handled by a service agent on multiple channels. This also includes how many tickets were closed by a single agent on a per-day and per-hour basis.
- First contact resolution (FCR): Also known as first call resolution, it is the percentage of customer queries that get resolved in the first instance when a customer interacts with an agent.
- Reopened ticket rate: A critical metric in an agent scorecard, it focuses on the percentage of tickets that are reopened after marking them as closed or resolved.
Service quality metrics
- Quality assurance (QA) score: The QA score measures how well an agent handles a customer interaction. The score is linked to specific quality standards, and an agent needs to meet the criteria to keep it high.
- Customer satisfaction score (CSAT): A CSAT score or a CSAT survey assesses how happy or unhappy your customers are based on their experience with your brand or post an agent interaction.
- Customer effort score (CES): CES score is arguably one of the most important metrics in a scorecard because it indicates how easy it is for a customer to get their query resolved while interacting with a support agent.
- Net promoter score (NPS): NPS taps into customer loyalty by using customer feedback to understand how likely they are to recommend a brand or make a purchase in the future.
- Communication clarity: This refers to how easily an agent conveys a message to a customer without repetition or causing confusion.
- Personalization: This is truly an important metric since it measures an agent’s capability to tailor the interaction according to a customer’s specific needs. An agent needs to offer that human touch to build a rapport and enhance customer experience.
- Problem-solving skills: An agent’s ability is measured when there is a complex customer query, and the agent is expected to effectively resolve their issue by keeping in mind the set limits of other metrics.
- Escalation rate: This metric is measured when an agent escalates a customer query to a higher-level agent. A high escalation rate means certain agents are unable to resolve a ticket at first contact.
Also read: Why Customer Satisfaction Scores Are Crucial To Boost Sales And Marketing
Create an effective agent scorecard in few simple steps
Designing the agent scorecard is an important step, and thus, it is recommended that you talk to your most experienced agents to identify gaps and areas of improvement in your customer support. Do not overload the scorecard with too many metrics and simply align it with your company’s most important objectives. Follow these straightforward guidelines.
- Define goals: Ask yourself the most important question, what do you want to achieve with a scorecard? When you know where your customer support lacks and how you can improve it, you will be able to define the right goals and develop the scorecard with ease.
- Select KPIs: Choose a combination of quantitative (AHT, FRT, ART) and qualitative (communication skills, problem-solving skills) metrics to measure the desired outcome of your customer support efforts. By focusing on the right metrics, you will be able to seamlessly assess and get a holistic view of your agents’ performance.
- Assign weightage: Assigning the right weightage to the right KPIs will establish your business priorities. Create a weighted scoring system and assign higher or lower weightage to the metrics so that your agents know the areas of focus.
- Implement an evaluation process and a feedback mechanism: When your agent scorecard is ready, you need to ensure that there is a well-defined evaluation process in place. Reviewing your agents’ performance. Regularly updating the scorecard based on growing business needs. And giving actionable feedback to agents based on the insights derived from the scorecard.
Businesses know the importance of quality and timely customer service and how it is crucial for customer loyalty. With OwlDesk’s scorecard feature, you can achieve higher agent productivity and ensure quality management of your service. Our AI automatically evaluates your client interactions and pulls out the most important categories for improvement. You can optimize the AI assessments, use targeted analytics, and measure the impact of your customer service to support your agent scorecard initiatives.
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