Learn Agent Efficiency Metrics with Liza

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to another volley rally. Today I'm joined once again by Liza. She has some really interesting agent efficiency metrics to share with you all. Liza, you want to take it away?

Yeah, I do. Thank you. I'm going to actually pull up and share my screen so that we have something to look at. I have some slides here that I want to show. Pulling from the Agent Efficiency Report now. Can you see it?

Yep, got it.

Now, the Agent Efficiency Report, which is a favorite of mine, we talk about it a lot on our internal phone calls. It's a great way to kind of see whether or not individual reps are performing at their highest level. As a BDC manager, you know, you're looking at a lot of reports to make sure that the entire room is working together. But it's important to also go down to that individual level and make sure that people aren't hiding in places or avoiding things that you don't want them to avoid. Make sure that everyone's performing kind of at their best. So I'm drilled down in a sample report. I'm in the productive time section, and I'm clicked into the calls section because the metrics that I want to talk about today are specific to phone calls. And I've broken them into inbound metrics and then outbound metrics. I'm looking at a week's worth of calls here. This is a real account. I have the names hidden. So we're going to evaluate some of those metrics just in this account. First thing that I look at when I'm looking at the inbound calls specifically is this ignores column. An ignored inbound call is an inbound call that was served to your rep. So. So it was ringing on their screen. They either clicked that decline button and declined the inbound call actively, or they didn't click anything at all. That call will ring on their screen for three rings. It's like six seconds or something like that. And if they don't answer it within that time, it moves to someone else. Either of those scenarios, so them clicking decline or them clicking nothing at all, kind of missing, that inbound is counted as an ignored call. So not a good behavior. We want that number to be low. I'm a little bit generous with this number. I would say no more than 10 per week gives you a little bit of leeway. Maybe someone actually did have to decline an inbound call because their manager came up to their desk or because they were already past when they were supposed to leave for lunch. So a little bit of leniency there. Basically, you're looking for your outliers. No one should be way higher than everyone else. I would say, as a general rule, no more than 10. Next metric that I'll jump into then is this ASA that stands for average speed of answer on an inbound call. Same scenario, it's when that phone call is ringing on your rep screen, how long does it take before they click the accept button? The reason that we want to encourage ASA to be fast is that it gets the customer off of hold while the rep is reviewing that pop up. You know, maybe they're looking at the store name or the campaign name, the customer name. If we have a perfect match, they're trying to gather all that information. And I get it, you know, to be prepared to talk to the customer. However, the customer, meanwhile, is sitting listening to hold music. So we want to get them off of that as quickly as possible. When we're going through our training, we kind of, you know, reassure the team all of that information. It's not going anywhere. As soon as they click accept, they still have visibility on the store name, campaign name, the customer name. And in fact, they have more now. They have everything else that they get in that communication center. So we want that to be pretty quick. I would set it no more than three seconds is what your standard might be. Next metric that I'm jumping over to is the average talk time you have. Totals for talk time and wrap up may be convenient if you're running a report. I always look at the averages. Average inbound call time varies a lot from account to account, so I see anywhere between two and six minutes. It's going to depend on what types of calls you're asking your team to field, what type of investigation they have to do. Are they setting appointments only? Are they also doing status checks when they do set an appointment? How granular are you asking them to be? So some of those things are going to impact how long your rep is on an average inbound phone call. Again, kind of look for outliers. If someone's on a call for much longer, are they getting stuck on things and maybe they could use a hand on the flip side, then wrap up is the time after that inbound call has ended so the customer is disconnected, or the customer is no longer talking to your rep and the rep is in that wrap up screen. They're taking notes, they're finishing up their disposition, all of that work that they do after the call is ended, before they save and pull up that next record on an Inbound phone call, I give a little bit more time. I say keep it under 60 seconds. And again, that's because a lot of these inbound phone calls are going to be resulting in an appointment. So I want to make sure that I'm giving the team time to finish inputting those details and make sure that all their notes are accurate before they move on. You can see in this account, though this account has been around for a while. Their reps, a few of them specifically are really good at multitasking. They don't need as much wrap up time because they're taking notes as they go. So they're kind of your, your gold stars. Maybe some of these that are closer up to the minute mark, those might be people that I'm kind of, you know, sitting with, working on to see if we can get that time down. I'll flip over now to outbound. So on the report I'm actually just scrolling to the right. First thing that I look at on outbound calls are the skips and the suspicious numbers. Both of these kind of similar to ignores. These are negative metrics, bad behavior kind of things. So we want to keep these to a minimum. Skips might not necessarily be that the agent is doing anything, you know, wrong, but you want to evaluate these. You don't want this number to be high. A skipped record is when the agent is served that outbound phone call, but instead of initiating the dial, they're seeing something on that record and they're saying I shouldn't call this person. So they're clicking that red skip record button. You should review these on a monthly basis at least and ask your reps to always enter notes. Why are you skipping that record? You know, if you're enrolling customers via query parameters or via a list, maybe your reps are doing some additional filtering that you could do for them in the query parameters. Don't put that work on your reps. So review the information that they're giving you. Talk to your volley rep about it and let's make those campaigns smarter where we can. Suspicious phone calls are very short duration outbound phone calls. I treat these similarly to the ignores. So under 10 per week it's possible that I was on a roll, I was doing my save and dial next save and dial next. I click save and dial next and then I realize, oh shoot, I'm five minutes past my lunch or whatever it is. So I quickly I disconnect the phone call so that I can switch myself over to break. That happens from time to time. Again with this account, it's much less than 10 per week. You know, their max is at 3. So use your judgment there. Look at your team, check for outliers. Could be an innocent mistake. But if we're starting to see a lot of those very short duration outbound calls, they're called suspicious for a reason. That might be something that you want to dig into further over then, kind of similar metrics as to what we were looking for on the inbound side. On the outbound side, we'll look at average ready. That's the time spent reviewing that record before we initiate the outbound dial. My standard there would be under 60 seconds. I might give my team three or four things that I want them to look at before they initiate the phone call. Maybe it's the customer's name, the vehicle that you're calling on, your reason for calling. Once you've got those three things, I want you to be initiating a phone call. I'm going to kind of talk about average talk time here too, which is my next metric. On the outbound side, because of, you know, contact rates, not everyone picks up your calls. We tend to see that the average talk time on outbound is right around one minute. If your contact rate is much higher than normal or than average, that average talk time might be longer. If your contact rate is very low, your average talk time will be lower. That being said, Right. I don't want my rep researching a phone call longer than they're actually on the phone. Right. So kind of watching those two things, give them kind of that checklist. Once you have these things, you're prepped, you should be calling and then average talk time, just something to look for there as well. Making sure that people aren't getting stuck. And then average rap time is going to be shorter than you see it on the inbound side. And that's because not every single phone call is connecting with a human. So on those calls where they're hitting voicemail, I would expect rap time to be almost nothing. You know, when, when I'm hitting that fourth or fifth ring, I know it's going to voicemail. I can select my voicemail disposition even before I end the call. So in that case, my rap time is nothing. So work with your team on that kind of thinking ahead on what their next step is going to be. Maybe entering the notes and picking the disposition even before they end the call will help improve that average wrap time. So those are my kind of top, whatever it is. 10 things to review the individual agent metrics on rule of thumb, I would say, is just start by looking for outliers. You might find someone who's really performing well. Have them maybe sit and shadow behind each of your reps that are struggling. You know, maybe have your your senior rep kind of sit behind someone's shoulder and they might be able to give some tips and tricks that help your your newer reps reach that level.

Awesome. Well, thank you for walking through that for us. These are some great metrics to benchmark for with running your bdc, and obviously Folly can help you monitor them. Liza, thanks for the time and I'm sure we'll have you on another one of these in the near future, but have a fantastic day.

Thank you.