Do You Show Your Agents Their Performance Scores?

February 11, 2021

Do You Show Your Agents Their Performance Scores?

 While most contact managers and supervisors agree that scoring calls are essential for the contact center’s success, there seems to be a debate on whether or not managers should show agents their performance scores. When ICMI surveyed 14 contact center managers, 50% believed that the agents should not see their scores. But why?

There are great arguments on both sides of the debate. Here’s why contact center managers don’t share call scores with their agents;

1. As soon as you mention the score to an agent, they stop thinking about improving their behaviors (which is the end goal) and focus more on the scores that affect their appraisal and promotion.
2. When a conversation with an agent begins with a deficit focus on QA scores, they immediately switch to fight or flight mode, making it impossible to learn.
3. Coaching can often turn into a haggling session with the agents debating on the degree to which they did or didn’t perform a specific behavior to get the scores up.

On the other hand, here are the reasons why contact managers share performance scores with their agents;

1. Showing agents their scores gives them a clearly defined path of expectations while serving as a reminder tool, ensuring consistent and high-quality customer-agent interactions.
2. It is crucial for agents to see their performance scores so they can know their strong points and areas for improvement.
3. Agents, contact center managers, and owners of the brand voice need these to view the success (or not) of the contact center.

Both sides of the argument are compelling. So should you show your agents their performance scores?
Keeping in mind that you can’t track what you don’t measure, it makes a lot of sense to share performance scores with your agents to work together towards the same goals continuously.
From the above argument, we can deduce that showing your agents their scores is not a matter of if; it’s a matter of how. Sharing feedback with your agents is crucial for your call center’s success, but only if it aims to inspire, gain commitment, educate, or change behavior.

Therefore, having a reliable system that captures and stores agent-customer interaction data is crucial to ensure that you always have access to historical data on agent performance.
This way, both you and the agent can track performance and intervene whenever help is needed. However, you must tie the scores back to customer satisfaction. If your agents are getting good scores, but the customers complain, something is wrong with your process.
Lastly, if you will share performance scores with your agents, you need to streamline your coaching process and ensure you track results over time.
Since the ultimate goal of a Call Center QA is to provide feedback so agents can modify their behavior, it is essential to provide timely and consistent coaching. Having a system that ranks agents based on their performance scores can help supervisors coach more effectively.
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