6 Easy Ways to be a Rockstar Call Center Agent

In my previous POST, we’ve listed down some of the best practices a rockstar call center agent does when she’s on the phone with the customer. To summarize, these are:

• Efficiency and timeliness;
• Genuine sincerity;
• Going the extra mile; and
• Effective communication

I hope you took the opportunity to try applying these best practices on your calls last week and proved to yourself how effective these best practices really are. As promised, here are 6 more ways to be a rockstar call center agent. Note that while the first 4 best practices listed earlier were what a rockstar call center agent does for the customer over the phone, these next best practices would be ways to be a rockstar call center agent from the operations side.

6 More Ways to be a Rockstar Call Center Agent

Balanced Score Card

Your call center uses several METRICS or Key Performance Indicators (KPI) to measure and identify strengths and opportunities of every call center agent. Among the more popular KPIs are Quality or QA Score which looks at the overall call experience and adherence to required standards,  scripts and disclosures, First Call Resolution (FCR) which measures how many times a customer needed to call to have an issue resolved or a question satisfactorily answered, Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) which measures via a third-party after-call survey how happy a customer was with the call center agent or with the company, Average Handle Time (AHT) which measures the average length of time it took to handle a call, Willingness To Recommend (WTR) which measures how willing customers are to recommend a product or service to friends and family, and Credits Per Call (CPC) which measures how much valid credits, if any, were given per call, among others. A rockstar call center agent knows which metrics matter most to operations and focuses her attention on getting good scores on those metrics. A rockstar call center agent knows that First Call Resolutions almost always result into high CSAT and WTR scores and does her best to resolve the customer’s concern as efficiently and as accurately as possible.

Team Player

A team is only as strong as its weakest member, and a rockstar call center agent will often take the lead and do the extra effort to carry the team forward and make up for the shortcomings of outliers in the team. Her determination to push the team forward has a positive influence on other team members and inspires them to do their share, as well. Crab mentality will destroy a team and the rockstar call center agent knows this all too well. Rather than pull people down and step on others just to get to the top, the rockstar call center agent will lend a hand and help pull her team members up. No fun being on top all by your self. Together Everyone Achieves More! Management is always looking for potential leaders among agents and a rockstar call center agent with the right qualities will have a definite advantage should she aspire for a higher post.

Goal-Driven

A rockstar call center agent is on a mission; she is driven by a singular desire to achieve her goal. She knows exactly where she is currently at and where she needs to be by the end of the month. She takes her stats seriously and knows what needs to be done to make up for any shortfall. A rockstar call center agent has goals far greater than her metrics. To her, metrics are merely numbers, stepping stones, mini-goals that she needs to achieve in order to move forward towards higher goals. Be it prestige, money, job security, a promotion or world peace, as long as she has her eyes on the prize, a rockstar call center agent is unstoppable. Instead of looking in awe and asking yourself “Why can’t I be like a rockstar?” I believe the better question should be “How can I be a rockstar call center agent?” 

Soft Skills Ninja

A rockstar call center agent is highly-skilled in the art of soft skills and inter-personal skills. Let’s face it, even if an agent gets perfect CSATs on every call but has the social skill of a Neanderthal or the attitude of a prima donna, chances are the agent won’t last very long in the account. A rockstar call center agent is well aware of politics on the operations floor and dances to the music and gets along with practically everybody on the floor. Not too intimate, though, as this attracts bad mojo. It makes more sense to get on everybody’s good side rather than antagonize with them. A rockstar call center agent is very dependable, mature and professional, qualities of a potential team leader should she eventually decide to take the leap. Being a soft skills ninja, a rockstar call center agent silently and humbly works her way up, careful not to blow her own trumpet which can attract ill will among co-workers.

Contagiously Positive

A rockstar call center agent oozes with tons of positive vibes that spreads throughout the floor and influences other team members. A rockstar call center agent will find something good even in the worst of times, enabling her to continue moving forward when others have already bogged down and given up. Life is no bed of roses and she’s had her fair share of bad times. The main difference is in how she handles pressure and challenges. She takes adversity as a challenge to strive even harder.  Fact is, adversity makes her smarter and stronger and she seems to be at her best when she is at her lowest. You will rarely see her haggard or angry or confused. In the face of challenges, the rockstar call center agent remains confident and cheerful. And people around her get inspiration from her and challenge themselves to do better.

Balanced Work Life

It is a fact that you need to be happy with whatever you are doing for you to excel doing it. But all work and no play does not a happy agent make. The rockstar call center agent realizes the importance of maintaining a healthy balance between work and leisure. She values the time she spends with family and friends as much as the time she spends helping her customers. In fact, it is the pleasure of spending quality time with family and friends that motivates the rockstar call center agent to excel at work so she can earn rockstar perks and privileges at work such as cash incentives and, more importantly, priority in getting approved leaves. After all, rockstars always get to have more perks than mere mortals. In effect, excelling at work enables the rockstar call center agent to spend more quality time with friends and family which keeps our rockstar happy with her work and excel even more.

To recap, we have listed some of the best practices of a rockstar call center agent in the hope that you would try applying some of these best practices at work and see how effective these can work for you. Let’s face it, not every one can be a rockstar call center agent. There has to be this deep hunger within you to want to be a rockstar. Most would probably be content with just getting through their shift. But again, as I had pointed out on my previous POST, you already are on the floor taking calls forty hours a week. It would not take too much additional effort to just try some of these best practices and become the rockstar that you have always wanted to be. It doesn’t matter whether you’re newbie or tenured, male or female, straight or gay, young or old. The only thing that matters is how bad you really want to be a rockstar call center agent. Good luck. Log in.

RELATED ARTICLE: Rockstar Call Center Agent Best Practices

Rockstar Call Center Agent Best Practices

“Every job is good if you do your best and work hard. A man who works hard stinks only to those who have nothing to do but smell others.”- Laura Ingalls Wilder, American Author

There are call center agents and then there are rockstar call center agents. Every month, when management gives out awards and incentives, rockstar call center agents go home with big fat bonuses while everyone else pretty much just goes home. Makes you wish you were a rockstar call center agent yourself, right? Well, I say stop wishing and start doing. In this post, I’ll show you 10 best practices that make a rockstar call center agent.

Anything worth doing is worth doing well. As a call center agent, you’re already spending at least 40 hours every week on the phone taking care of customers. Why not go the extra mile and do the best practices a rockstar call center agent does and benefit tremendously from it? These best practices will take just a little more effort, just a bit more push to pull you out from the mire of mediocrity and propel you into rockstar call center agent status!

Rockstar Call Center Agent Best Practices

Efficiency and Timeliness

Time is gold and customers value their time. According to a 2014 study by workforce management firm ClickSoftware, Americans spent an average of 30 hours annually waiting on the phone. This is roughly equivalent to $753.00 or a whopping $108 Billion worth of time wasted by every employed adult American. Over 35% of customers who got frustrated transacting with a call center agent have cancelled their service. These staggering numbers alone should give you an idea how valuable time actually is to your customers and should make you realize why customers get so frustrated every time they are put on hold or have to wait for a call center agent to resolve their concerns. A rockstar call center agent takes advantage of this fact and one of her best practices is to make the customer feel how much she values the customer’s time and will do everything to resolve the customer’s concern in an efficient and timely manner. A rockstar call center agent avoids placing the customer on hold as much as possible. If a customer really needs to be put on hold, the rockstar will clearly explain why the hold is necessary and set the customer’s expectations how long the hold will be. Active listening is vital so that customers do not have to repeat themselves. When a customer feels you are efficient, competent and you truly value her time, she will definitely be one happy customer. So happy she might just give you a perfect “10”!

Genuine Sincerity

If there is one reason why customers prefer talking to a call center agent to resolve a concern rather than transacting business with an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system, it’s because of the warmth and sincerity of a human call center agent on the other end. Take that warmth and sincerity away and chances are Artificial Intelligence will replace most call center agent functions much sooner than expected. Apparently, those IT guys have yet to develop an algorithm to replicate human sincerity and this remains to be the single biggest advantage a call center agent has over machines. A rockstar call center agent ALWAYS projects genuine sincerity in her tone on every call. I know it’s not easy but genuine sincerity is what separates a rockstar call center agent from everybody else and if you want to be a rockstar call center agent, you have to depart from those canned empathy statements that practically everybody uses and develop your own unique way of projecting genuine sincerity.

Go the Extra Mile and Then Some

Every customer who transacts business with a call center agent expects her concern to be resolved. That’s expected. And if the call center agent does exactly what the customer expected and nothing else, then there’s nothing special about that transaction and the call ends “Passive”, at best. However, if the call center agent can go the extra mile and provide the customer something extraordinary and unexpected that the customer can appreciate, then the potential for the customer to give the call center agent a perfect “10” becomes higher. And the extra service doesn’t have to be huge or earth-shaking. Something as simple as being friendly, sincere, competent, or efficient can be well appreciated. The customer will love you for providing her self-serve options that can make her life much easier. As a call center agent, you already have an idea how to resolve your customer’s concern but you don’t have to lay down all your cards on the table right away. Rather than tell the customer how easy it will be to resolve her concern, do the opposite and make the customer feel that it will take a bit of effort to resolve her concern but reassure her that you will do everything to make certain her concern gets resolved as efficiently as possible. You’re not exactly being dishonest here. You’re just making the customer feel she is special and that you will take special care of her concern. Under promise but over deliver. That’s how you WOW your customer. That’s how you become a rockstar call center agent.

Effective Communication

Communication is a two-way highway. On top of the ability to speak clearly, a rockstar call center agent also practices active listening on every call. It is very frustrating for any customer to have to repeat themselves. It is even more frustrating if the customer senses that the call center agent did not understand the customer’s real concern. Often, because a call center agent gets the same customer concerns on practically every call, there is the tendency to be complacent and provide a solution based merely on keywords the customer says. While this may seem like an efficient way of resolving the customer’s concern, the risk here is the call center agent may miss a key point in what the customer was saying and may end up providing an inaccurate resolution and frustrating the customer even more. If unsure, a rockstar call center agent will paraphrase what the customer said just to verify accuracy. Be mindful of the difference between paraphrasing and parroting. A rockstar call center agent chooses her words well before she opens her mouth, using power words and avoiding jargons customers may not be familiar with. A rockstar call center agent will never interrupt the customer and confidently speaks in a low, calm tone.

Information overload is never a good thing. I’ve got a few more best practices for you on the next post but for now, let these rockstar call center agent best practices sink in first. Take what you can from these best practices and apply them on your calls. Try and tweak these best practices to suit your unique personality. You should expect a gradual improvement in your scorecard over the next few days after applying these best practices. Don’t rush it. Just enjoy your journey from mediocrity to rockstar call center agent. See you on the next post.

RELATED ARTICLE: 6 More Ways to be a Rockstar Call Center Agent

Call Center Agents Perish in the Line Of Duty

I normally would write happy thoughts this Christmas day but tragic news from Davao left me deeply depressed instead.

As of this writing, at least 37 call center agents have perished in an inferno that razed a Davao City mall where their call center holds office. The fire struck Saturday morning just a few minutes before the mall opens and just before most of those midshift call center agents would have logged out. But the mall never got to open and the midshift never got to finish their shift.

The cause of the fire and why in heaven's name those 37 call center agents never got out is under investigation and we will leave it to the authorities to answer those questions and bring justice to the hapless victims. I just cannot help but think what if the fire had struck just a little after the mall had opened and after most of those call center agents have already logged out. Would the fire have been less tragic?

Considering they were still logged in when the fire broke out, those 37 call center agents perished in the line of duty. They died while performing their duty. Call center agents have often been referred to as "mga bayaning puyat" (sleepless heroes) because their work often requires them to be on graveyard shifts. The fact that those 37 call center agents perished in the line of duty makes their death somewhat heroic.

Chances are, most of those 37 call center agents probably have shifts on Christmas Eve. Chances are, those call center agents may have already told family and friends they "won't be home for Christmas". They all have no idea how tragically true those words would be.

Just an advise, in the event of a catastrophic emergency such as a fire, an active shooter or an earthquake, quickly excuse yourself from your customer, log out if you still can then go for the nearest safe exit. Don't even bother running to the lockers to grab your things. Your safety is paramount. CSATs and iPhones you can always replace.

As you read this post, please say a little prayer for those call center agents we tragically lost this Christmas. May their families find closure and justice. More importantly, we also pray tragedies like this never happen again.

A blessed Christmas to all.