Tips to improve the bottom quartile in BPO

Often advisors in call center does not take their job seriously as most of them come to do it either part-time or just temporary for fun. Hence, improving the performance of a bottom quartile as well as retaining the talent is a hard nut to crack for a team leader.

But the fact is that clients have nothing to do with it .They want their targets to be met by any means. Therefore, it becomes imperative for a team leader or manager to focus on improving the bottom qurtile rather then removing them from system .

Tips to improve the bottom quartile in BPO

Having been into the customer service industry for more than15 years I have penned down 

few Tips to improve bottom quartile in call center .

Track daily performance:

This is the very first task that should be on every team leader's daily to-do list. The more you keep an eye on the bottom quartiles the more you will figure out the pain areas. Now , one needs to understand that increasing supervision does not mean standing around the advisor every time and interrupting him/her every second because advisor may find you annoying.

Increasing supervision means to start tracking advisors basic hygiene ,working style , his/her daily performance and accordingly sharing constructive feedback if this style is leading to low performance.

Tracking daily performance can give some meaningful insights that where your bottom agents are lacking . Is it the product knowledge where they need assistance or any soft skill issue which requires immediate attention 

Also read: How to calculate BQM in call center ? 

Training and refresher session:

After tracking and analyzing the need for a bottom quartile agent start conducting training and refresher session on these topics . Deploy one dedicated trainer or quality evaluator to provide daily or weekly refresher sessions to these agents

Apart from stationing one trainer, a team manager should also deploy one dedicated SME (Subject matter expert ) or a floor walker to provide assistance on real time . These exercises are very helpful to improve the bottom quartiles performance and the result can be seen within a couple of weeks.

Also read: Role of a QA in call center 

Increase the audit count:

After providing training and coaching to these bottom quartiles increase the audit count for these agents. These audits can help you to understand whether all training and refresher sessions are going in the right direction 

Try to audit these chats from different perspectives. Like for one bottom quartile agent  a quality auditor can audit the chat keeping in to consideration the call length , any specific queue in which the agent is struggling or the shift timing of agents. These all can give you a 360-degree picture of root cause forr agent's low performance.

Mentor-Mentee programme:

This programme is one of the most successful programmes to improve the performance of a a bottom quartile agent in call center. In this programme you can choose one of the tenured resources from the team who has good product knowledge and has good performance record in past and you can  make him/her accountable for the performance of assigned bottom quartile agent

So the tenured resource will work as a Mentor and the bottom quartile will work as a Mentee . This programme has been very successful in Call center industry hence whenever we talk on how to improve the performance of bottom agents, this programme comes in mind first.

In addition , this programme can hit two birds from one stone means  your bottom agent performance would be improved and you can also groom your tenured resource for the leadership role or for other responsible tasks

Observing WoW performance:

As of now, we are doing every bit to improve the agent's performance starting from tracking the performance to launch the mentor-mentee programme.The final nail in the coffin would be to observe the Week on Week trend of bottom quartile agents after implementing all these exercises and hard work.

This will show the improvement trend of these agents. You can easily identify ,which agent has shown tremendous improvement and  which agent we still need to focus on.

Let's understand it by an example

We have 2 bottom quartile agents for Apr month. I have taken a KPI (AHT) to review the performance of these agents. My AHT target is 240 secs 

After 4 weeks of continuous implementation of the above programmes here is the result :

Below is the graphical representation of their performance 

It is clearly visible that agent Rakesh (Blue line ) has shown significant improvement, while agent Suresh (Grey Line) still needs a lot of work.

This way we can track and review their performance 

The above-shared tips are not only a few to improve the performance of bottom quartile but there are many depends on the business , agents and organization you are working in.

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On this note, kindly allow me to wrap up the article. If you have any questions or suggestions feel free to drop your thoughts in the comment box.

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