What is Cluster Analysis in Call Center
Call Center’s performance depends on various metrics. Every metric in the call center contributes to either rewards or penalty. Needless to say, call center leaves no stone unturned to improve the metric numbers.
What is Cluster Analysis in the Call Center
The first and most important factor which impacts the call center metric is agent’s performance. If you have skilled call center agents then it is easier to achieve the target , however expecting 100% manpower to be skilled is not fair, rather we can work on low- performing agents to improve their score.
Though there are multiple techniques to identify the bottom performing agents some of them are BQM (Bottom Quartile Management), Cluster analysis, Agent Quintiling, etc.
Also Read: What is Agent quintile report?
In today’s blog we will understand the Cluster Analysis in the Call Center and also will cover below points:
- What is Cluster Analysis?
- What is Cluster Analysis in the Call Center?
- How to perform Cluster Analysis?
- How to improve the Cluster 4 agents?
Without further ado let’s start today’s topic:
What is Cluster Analysis in Call Center
Let’s first understand what is the basic meaning of “Cluster Analysis”.
What is Cluster Analysis?
Cluster, as its name suggests, refers to a group of people, things or any matter.
Cluster analysis of data is a process of dividing the data into similar clusters or groups and after assessing the group behavior we produce some result out of it this whole process is called Cluster Analysis.
What is Cluster Analysis in Call Center?
“Cluster Analysis in reference to the call center is a method to divide call center agents into 4 equal groups on the basis of their performance and further analyzing every group’s impact on overall performance“.
However, it does not mean that 4 groups have an equal number of agents as there may be similar scores achieved by many agents, which can result in variance in the total number of agents in each group.
With the help of Cluster Analysis, we can also perform impact analysis.
Further, in example below we will understand, how can we perform Cluster Analysis in the Call Center in a given data
Assume that we have 20 agents in a process with their NPS Score and survey count and we have to do a cluster analysis on these agents.
I have attached google sheet below to follow the entire process of performing cluster analysis with the required formula. Copy and paste the data into excel to review.
Below I have outlined the stepwise guide to achieve the result.
1.The first process is to sort the NPS score in descending order.
2.Rank these experts as per their score with the help of the RANK formula” from excel.
3.Cluster these agents with the help “A Cell/COUNT (A-Z)” formula” and multiply the result by 4 ( as we need 4 groups).
The desired result will be a Clusters from 1-4 with equal division of every group.
Please note in our example as per the NPS scores every agent has a different NPS Score (except 2-3 cases) which resulted in cluster 1-4 with 5 agents in each cluster.
The final result is the Cluster wise NPS Score:
 |
| Cluster Wise NPS Score |
As we can see in the above snapshot cluster 4 agents have scored only 14% of NPS while cluster 1 agents have scored 62% NPS.
Now with the help of the NPS target and with these scores, I can also perform impact analysis on the above data. For our example, NPS target is 60% .
How to Perform Impact Analysis ?
Now, let me share with you step by step procedure to perform impact analysis :
1. We will subtract the NPS target from every cluster’s NPS score and the result will be as below:
2.Now, We will add one more column of “Count of Agents” in every Cluster i.e. 5. To get the Impact by every cluster on the NPS Score we will multiply the Deficit from Target column to the (Cluster Agent/Total Agents) column and here is the result:
 |
| Impact Analysis of Cluster |
Insights:
As we can clearly see, Cluster 1 agents have a positive impact on NPS as they have already achieved the target while the rest of the Clusters i.e. 2, 3, and 4 have impacted negatively the overall NPS, especially Cluster 4 where the score is impacted by 46%.
Quick Tip: If you want to verify that the impact analysis is correct or not , just check the overall Deficit from the NPS Target column and the overall Impact on NPS Column, if they both are the same it means Impact Analysis is correct.
As in our case you can see both are 23% which means the Impact Analysis is correct.
How to Improve Cluster 4 Agents ?
Now the question comes, what we can do to improve the performance of Cluster 4 agents ?
To improve the performance of Cluster 4 agents below are 5 useful and proven tips :
- Conduct daily/weekly refresher sessions on skill issues or product knowledge.
- Conduct PKT (Product knowledge test) to assess the product knowledge of agents.
- More quality audits for Cluster 4 experts.
- Increase the visibility of Real-time support to these agents.
- Assign one dedicated Coach who will only work with Cluster 4 experts.
*************************ENDS*************************
So readers, I hop you like the article on Cluster Analysis in the Call Center , do share your views in the comment box.
For any suggestions or queries write us at: callcentertalks26@gmail.com
STAY HAPPY, STAY HEALTHY😀