How to Give Feedback to Remote Agents

Every agent on your team can use feedback to improve, increase efficiency, and learn how to move into specialized customer service roles. Sometimes, it can be difficult for agents to always know where they can improve their skills and supervisors should be offering feedback and building growth plans for agents.

But how can you give feedback to agents in the best way possible? Especially when they are remote agents?

Scheduled One-on-Ones

Supervisors should have regular one-on-ones with remote agents. These meetings can review past metrics, highlight good customer feedback, and discuss areas of improvement. One-on-ones shouldn’t be used to discipline agents, but help build and develop their skills.

Review CSAT Scores

The customer satisfaction survey is the most direct feedback system for supervisors to review. While CSAT surveys funnel the entire support experience into a single question, finding outliers and researching the highest and lowest scores help improve overall agent performance.

Maybe remote agents are scoring a low CSAT because of a complex issue. Supervisors can identify correlated data and build a new workflow to provide a better solution.

Agent Metrics

A quality management solution will provide a lot of customer service data for both agents and supervisors. Daily agent reports can show the work efficiency of an agent while a monthly report can reveal bigger trends. Through the use of a quality management platform, supervisors could see what channels an agent is most productive in and make strategic operational adjustments.

These reports should be brought into an agent one-on-one to give some insight into the total productivity of an agent. Places they’re excelling at, areas to improve, and agent feedback can be presented during these one-on-ones.

Supervisor (Remote) Office Hours

Everyone on the customer service team is busy and sometimes it’s difficult to know when to reach out with a problem. It’s simple to say that “you’re always available,” but it may not always feel like that. Supervisors should schedule general office hours and allow agents to schedule a time to talk.

This will reduce pressure on agents to reach out for meetings that don’t meet any specific needs. It also will give remote agents opportunities to give open feedback about processes. Office hours also allow agents to speak more freely than in a regimented one-on-one or team meeting.

Supervisors have to be the voice of the company while guiding and teaching agents on how to be the voice of the brand to customers, especially when teams are remote For supervisors, it also enables an open platform to learn more about agents outside of segmented and isolated roles.

Feedback is Great for Everyone

Feedback shouldn’t just come from a supervisor to the agent. Supervisors can also benefit from getting feedback. This can help them improve tools and processes, find new solutions to old problems, and generally raise the effectiveness of both individuals and the entire team overall.

No one should be siloed, especially remote agents who might feel that because they’re not physically in an office, they have less of a right to speak up. In one way or another, remote work and remote customer service teams are here to stay and it’s important that they receive as much, if not more, feedback communication from support organizations.

 

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