Call Center 101 – The Building Blocks of Success
There are many reasons to implement a call center into your business plan. Your sales volume is growing and you need more personnel to process orders, up-sell and offer delivery tracking and customer service. Or possibly your repeat sales volume has stagnated and you’ve decided a dedicated customer service survey is warranted to investigate the cause. Are you considering launching a new product line or expanding into a new market territory? If so, call center services can identify the interest and urgency within your potential clients and customers.
Whatever the reason, once you make the decision to utilize either outbound or inbound call center services, it is imperative that you have a mechanism in place to monitor the effectiveness of your project and the representatives executing your plan.
Sun King Consulting works hand in hand with you and your company’s key personnel to develop a focused campaign to achieve your goals. Once the campaign is implemented there are important metrics to be measured and interpreted, enabling you to make the most appropriate decisions, prioritize action plans and gain a competitive advantage over your marketplace rivals.
Our nearshore business solutions partners at the LATAM Center track hundreds of metrics, monitoring your project in real time, and provide the training, leadership and feedback necessary for telephone representatives to achieve the results your business demands.
If you are new to the world of call center campaigns or call center metrics, take a look at the following list of basic, fundamental metrics that will always be a part of evaluating and fine tuning your corporation’s call center program.
SERVICE
- Abandon Rate – The total number of abandoned calls and the abandon rate. Effected by the call center’s average wait time in queue, and also factors on the caller’s side: time of day, individual caller tolerance, service alternatives, etc.
- Service Level – The percentage of calls answered within a predefined wait time period or threshold.
- Average Speed of Answer -ASA is the average wait time of calls withing a period of time.
- Longest Delay in Queue – LDQ represents how long the oldest call in the queue has been waiting.
QUALITY
- First Resolution Rate – Monitors the percentage of transactions (sales, service) that are completed within a single call or contact. A invaluable measure of quality, FSR gauges both the call center and the individual’s ability to successfully complete an interaction without transferring to another person or requiring a future interaction.
- Transfer Rate – What percentage of contacts must be transferred to another person or location for resolution or completion. Monitored in order to adjust the most effective routing of contacts as well as individual knowledge and efficiency.
- Professional Courtesy – Your customers’ perception how well they were treated during a contact. Were they treated with appropriate respect and empathy?
- Procedures – Your call center’s campaign has well defined scripts, rules and interaction procedures so your customers receive consistent quality of service and attention.
EFFICIENCY -
- Agent Occupancy – a measure of the actual time a representative is busy on customer contacts compared with available or idle time. Used to help determine how well the call center is staffed and the efficiency of resources used.
- Shrinkage – The amount of time agents are not available to handle contacts due to breaks, paid time off, meetings, training, etc. Another vital tool to measure staffing and efficiency levels.
- Average Handle Time – Consists of the actual talk time and any after call time needed to complete or close out an interaction. Monitored for differences by day of the week as well as time of day, etc.
- Systems Availability – Measures the total time and percentage of time that all sytems required to provide proper service levels are available and functioning at full capacity. Slow, unresponsive or inoperable technology haan immediate and negative impact on your project.
- Conversion Rate – The percentage of interactions that result in an actual sale or completion of the predefined goal for that customer contact. Measured both as an absolute number and as a percentage.
- Cost Per Call – A basic measure of efficiency, cost per call or cost per minute can be measured as a simple labor cost per call, or expressed as a fully loaded rate defined by wage rates, facilities, equipment costs, etc.
These metrics are just a few of the many components monitored during call center operations. Take advantage of our expertise in designing, executing and supervising customer service and sales campaigns to drive your business to the next level.
