What's the best way to improve agent performance in consumer finance?

If you said metrics, you're on the right track. But if agent KPIs only include quantitative metrics such as number of calls made or wrap time, it's only half the story.

If you want your agents to improve on those easily measurable statistics, you need to understand how they get there.

‍You need to be able to evaluate qualitative agent performance.

The easiest place to find that information? Agent call notes.

Why basic agent metrics aren't enough

A number-of-calls metric isn’t so bad. It lets agents accomplish measurable, clear goals and correlates somewhat to other goals, such as total collected or right-party contact percentages.

We’re not saying you should forget these indicators — just that there’s so much more beneath the surface. 

And if every agent is producing notes in their own way, you're missing all of it.

What standardized call notes reveal

But you can’t analyze every conversation to discover exactly what was said on every call, and then relate that back to a result. Can you?

With standardized call notes, you absolutely can. Let’s run through some examples.

Example 1:

Imagine tracking first-call resolutions (FCRs) in a healthcare contact center. It's great to know which agents are getting FCRs, but until you analyze call notes, you'll never see that:

• Agent A never gets a first-call resolution when Insurance Provider X is mentioned. 
• Agent B always gets a first-call resolution when Insurance Provider X is mentioned. 

Now that you know some details of Agent B’s success, you can look into their responses. What script are they using? What other things happen on that call?

And on the flip side, what isn’t Agent A doing that they could be doing?

Once you know how your reps are getting their results, Agent B’s success can become Agent A’s success. And FCRs will jump up overall.

Example 2:

OK, how about this one: Financial experiences are fraught and agents must express empathy. Do RPCs or FCRs tell you the whole story? 

Standardized notes allow you to easily understand the consumer’s experience relative to each agent.

If Agent C gets a compliment on every call, you might want to know why. What if it turned out that Agent C had a perfect script for supporting their contact through the conversation? You’d want to quickly replicate that behavior. 

Using standardized notes to evaluate agent performance

Wouldn't it be nice if you could evaluate every aspect of your agents' performance like this?

Using standardized notes, you can. Here's how:

Step 1: Implement an automated notes and summarization solution.

Step 2: Define your top KPIs and categories.

Step 3: Select an interval and scale.

Discover what’s happening at scale (e.g., satisfaction scores are low in comparison to last year across the board), in a given timeframe and segment (RPC calls fell this month in this segment) and at an individual level (Agent A’s payment rate is down long-term).

Step 4: Generate your reports.

Once you've got the insights, you can share them with your agents at the level of detail in the agent scorecard we've included above.

Insights for action

With detailed reporting on qualitative metrics, your contact center can address a lot of new options and opportunities. The best part is that all of this comes from data your agents are already creating: call notes. 

Want to learn more about how you can become more productive, compliant, and customer-focused, all by enabling your agents? Talk to our team using the button below.

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