Improving Call Centre Agents’ Performance: The Key Factors for Better Service Quality

Contact volumes are rising week on week; customers are using more and more channels to get in touch with your business, and the complexity of enquiries is constantly increasing. For your team, this means growing backlogs, long call queues and more frequent dropped calls. To your customers, agents seem slow, and the quality of your customer service can vary greatly. All of these are reasons why the performance of call centre agents is so important.

However, your agents’ performance is not an individual employee issue! Quality and performance stem from a system comprising:

• Skill-based routing
• Knowledge management
• Workforce and quality management, as well as
• Coaching and feedback

Even if you wish to outsource your customer service, this issue is still relevant to you! This is because outsourcing primarily solves the capacity problem, but performance is only achieved through standards, transparency and management. Your outsourcing partner should define this with you and actively contribute to meeting your standards!

What does ‘performance’ really mean in a call centre?

In a contact centre, performance is not a single, stand-alone KPI, but is made up of these three elements:

But be careful: don’t focus solely on AHT! This can lead to agents trying to keep calls as short as possible. Whilst this may mean that enquiries or tickets are closed more quickly, it can seriously compromise quality. Hasty responses or rushing through calls are the main reasons for repeat contacts and an increase in escalations.

Improving call centre agent performance: The 6 key levers

So how can you improve performance in a sustainable and holistic way? Here you’ll find the key starting points and levers to achieve this.

Lever 1: Skill-Based Routing. The Right Cases for the Right Agents

Routing is one of the quickest and most effective ways to boost performance, as it tackles the issue at its source. Skill-Based Routing refers to an intelligent distribution system that directs incoming enquiries to specific staff members. After all, if your agent is an expert in the subject matter of the enquiry, the issue will be resolved quickly and to the customer’s satisfaction.

The impact of skill-based routing is evident in the results: the FCR decreases, CSAT becomes more stable and, as a result, AHT falls.

Lever 2: Knowledge management that makes agents faster and better

Knowledge management is a direct driver of performance. It ensures shorter search times, fewer errors and greater standardisation. It also makes the onboarding of new staff more efficient.

So make sure that everything needed can be found in one place. This knowledge base should be well-structured and cover various topics, such as:

• Common reasons for contact / enquiries and solutions
• Exceptions
• Templates and guidelines
• Escalation paths and points of contact

Don’t forget to keep your content up to date! After all, only up-to-date information truly enables agents to handle all enquiries effectively.

How can you tell if your knowledge management is successful? Quite simply, the FCR rises, the error rate falls and onboarding becomes faster.

Lever 3: Quality assurance through the QA Score

A QA Score is a standardised assessment form that helps to streamline quality processes and ensure consistent feedback. However, this is only a successful performance lever if it also enables quality control. Two specific levels are usually used for this purpose: Quality Behaviour and Critical Errors.

• Quality Behaviour: These errors can be improved through training and feedback, such as structure and clarity in conversations, questioning techniques or next steps for various issues.
• Critical Errors: These are serious errors, such as those relating to compliance or data protection. The focus here is specifically on risk and damage prevention.

To ensure that quality assurance remains effective and fair, it is important that you do not just review poor or error-prone cases, but a mix of random samples. You must also ensure that the assessment score is transparent and comprehensible. Only then can your agents understand the assessments and improve their performance.

Viewing quality assurance as root cause analysis

QA only has the greatest impact when it identifies the root causes. Simply stating that ‘an agent is performing poorly’ is not enough. The question is: why did the error occur?

Common causes of poor performance include:

• Lack of knowledge or knowledge that is difficult to find
• Unclear or overly complex processes
• Complicated tools that are therefore prone to errors
• Incorrect call routing
• Call handling

Once you know the cause, you can devise effective measures to address it.

Lever 4: Coaching and training that change behaviour

Training and coaching are effective when they are regular, specific and practice-based. That is why short, weekly one-to-one feedback sessions are far more beneficial than, for example, half-yearly performance appraisals. The focus should always be on coaching behaviour, rather than simply explaining the appraisal.

If necessary, set your agents a clear goal during the feedback session, e.g. better diagnostic questions or clearer summaries with next steps.

A set coaching template will help you put this into practice:

1. Clarify the objective
2. Highlight positive behaviour
3. Identify specific behaviour that needs improvement
4. Demonstrate the correct approach using an example
5. Practise briefly, e.g. through a short role-play
6. Secure a commitment

Lever 5: Workforce Management and Schedule Adherence

Many performance issues are actually capacity and stability issues. When bottlenecks occur here, queues grow, stress levels rise, calls become shorter and quality declines. Escalations and complaints increase, not because your agents are performing poorly, but because your customers are frustrated.

Schedule adherence is therefore a key service stability metric. Is the planned capacity in the right place at the right time? This relies on forecasting (including seasonal trends, campaigns and product launches), realistic contingency planning (for sickness, meetings and training) and clear real-time management that handles exceptions and sets priorities.

It is important to note that targets must be differentiated by channel (voice, email, chat, etc.) and according to agents’ experience (new vs. experienced staff).

Lever 6: Tools and Automation

Automation through tools has clear objectives: to reduce the workload, resolve standard cases more quickly, cut down on call follow-up time and ensure more consistent responses. This is the only way to maintain a consistent level of quality.

Automation options:

• Agent Assist: Suggested responses based on the reason for contact and context
• Knowledge Surfacing: relevant articles and information are displayed automatically
• Next-Base-Action logic: if X, then Y
• Conversation analytics: frustration triggers, compliance risks or drivers for escalations

Automation does not replace QA or training! But it makes both scalable, as manual errors are reduced, onboarding becomes faster and, as a result, more time is left for complex cases.

Outsourcing in particular: governance, standards and responsibilities

Outsourcing can only function reliably if responsibilities are crystal clear.

XELEO: Your outsourcing partner for optimal agent performance

XELEO is your customer solution expert and can manage either your entire customer service operation or specific parts of it. We design our solutions to integrate seamlessly into your existing processes. We specialise in particular in the telecommunications, energy supply, electric mobility and payments sectors.

Our strength in outsourcing lies in manageability and quality. With knowledge bases, regular training and transparent reporting, we ensure that our agents consistently deliver top performance and provide your customers with round-the-clock support to their complete satisfaction. Thanks to our in-depth WFM expertise (forecasting, shift planning), we can scale reliably: from seasonal peaks to multilingual 24/7 operations. Let us professionally outsource your customer support and improve it in a targeted manner.

Please feel free to contact us at any time via our contact form or by telephone on 02742/28520. We look forward to hearing from you!