With the emergence of call centers in the corporate world, there is a vital need to estimate call center performance. Nowadays, no matter what business you operate or manage, your customers' experience is the most crucial factor that decides your success.
Measuring the performance of your call center services offers a lot of benefits. It helps you understand the progress of your business in terms of both growth and profit. However, doing this is not easy. Every business has different goals, objectives, priorities, and needs. It is why you must measure your call center performance accurately, and this can only be achieved through implementing metrics.
In this article, we will discuss how you can accurately measure the performance of call center in India and the ways to improve it. But before we do that, you must understand how your call center is performing.
So, let's get started…
What sets a Call center apart?
Businesses that constantly strive to generate higher revenue pay keen attention to their call center performance. They know exactly when they are meeting the expectations of their customer and when they are falling behind. When their call center services fail in bringing the desired results, they change the strategy and revamp it to reach their targets. To achieve that, the call center measures the key performance indicators (KPIs), which helps them in:
- Improving the customer experience
- Managing the workforce
- Controlling the costs
- Boosting the revenue
- Retaining customer
- Building a new customer base
Call center metrics is the key player in the call center industry. These metrics will help you understand what is working in your favor and whatnot.
Below we are listing the key performance indicators (KPIs) to help you measure the performance of your call center services.
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Blockages
No matter how much you hate to admit it, there would be a time when customers fail to connect to the live agent despite the times they place the call. There could be several reasons behind this. Too many callers might be calling at the same time, too many callers on the queue, which could lead to blockage for other callers. Call centers must acknowledge these problems and prevent them from occurring again in the future.
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Average Handling Time
Average handling time is nothing but the time given to call center agents to handle the queries of the caller. The average handling time differs from one department to another. For example, a technical customer representative will need more handling time as he will be troubleshooting the problem, which requires more time as compared to a customer care representative, which would only be handling billing issues.
Other than average handling time, you must also focus on key factors like ring time, queue time, talk time, hold time, and wrap time to understand the services better. You must understand which of these are more vital for your business to improve your customer care services.
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Agent Productivity
Agent productivity is another vital metric that your call center must pay attention to. It includes the different activities performed by agents in the call center, like productive activities and non-productive activities. The productive activities include the time spent on call, performing after-call work, training, etc., while the non-productive activities include breaks and waiting time for the calls. Analyzing how these ratio changes can help you keep track of how your agents are performing and staying productive at work.
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Abandon Rate
Abandon rate is somewhat related to blockages. Do you ever keep track of customers who hang up the call while trying to connect to your agent? Yes, the Abandon rate is another vital metric that you must not ignore to offer your customers the best call center services.
When customers fail to reach you, it not only causes dissatisfaction in them. But it also takes away your chance to make a successful sale. To ensure that it does not happen in your call center services, check if you have adequate staff to handle the customer calls. Also, pay attention to the waiting time.
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Customer Satisfaction
For every business, it is the customer that decides its success. With more customers comes more sales. And to maintain customer retention and build a new customer base through your call center, you must take timely feedback and understand how your customer care services are performing. Conduct timely post-contact surveys via IVR, email, chat, call, etc.
Conducting regular customer satisfaction surveys help you find out:
● The percentage of customers satisfied with the services they receive.
● How easy it was for customers to get their queries solved and answered.
● What changes do you need to bring in your strategy to deliver better?
● Net promoter score, which tells about customer interest to recommend your company's services to others.
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Cross-talk & Silence Detection
You might be someone who likes silence but not when your call center agents are talking to the customers. The silence indicates your agents' incompetence; hence you must ensure that silence detection and cross-talk don't occur when your agents handle the customer queries. For those who don't know, cross talk is when the agents do not let the customer complete the sentences or interrupt them while talking.
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Quality
A quality score is an agent's effectiveness statistic. It assesses how well an agent handled a specific call with a customer or the accuracy and civility of an agent's encounters with clients. It is a significant statistic from an internal perspective to monitor how agents adhere to policy and procedure, as well as other quality requirements defined by an organization.
Of course, businesses always want their calls to be handled by the company's standards and procedures. But in reality, only around 1-2% of calls are randomly assessed in a standard manual quality assurance method. As a result, it's easy to overlook areas that require your attention or extra training and coaching.
But to avoid these issues, companies can have 100% of conversations automatically screened using speech analytics. It will help them analyze customer objections, detect agent script adherence or compliance, and determine the language that works best for completing sales deals.
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Service level
Service level is the statistic to measure the percentage of calls that agents answer within a specific time. More often than not, an agent's service level goal is to answer 80 percent of calls within 30 seconds (80/30). This is a useful KPI for ensuring that a call center has adequate staff for inbound phone lines and that client call wait times are reasonable.
The issue with this statistic is that it ignores all calls that do not meet the service level target in terms of wait time. This implies, the service level metric ignores the 20% of calls that agents do not respond to within 30 seconds if they meet their 80/30 goal. Many of the calls that agents do not respond to within the service level receive a response within 30 seconds. But, if a substantial percentage of callers have to wait 60 seconds or longer for an agent to answer their call, then it's a problem.
To avoid such errors that can cause customer dissatisfaction, call centers in India must also track other KPIs, such as the percentage of calls on which agents reply in intervals longer than 30 seconds.
Here are the four ways organizations can calculate Service Level:
(Number of Calls Answered in the time period ÷ Total Calls Received) x 100%
{(Number of Calls Answered in the time period) ÷ (Total Calls Answered + Total Abandoned Calls)} x 100%
{(Number of Calls Answered in the time period) ÷ (Total Calls Answered + Total Abandoned Calls after a time period)} x 100%
{(Number of calls answered within the time period + calls abandoned within the time limit) ÷ (Total calls answered + Total calls abandoned)} x 100%
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Cost per call
An essential parameter for calculating the financial cost of answering consumer phone calls is the cost per call. The call center's leadership and the finance department are in charge of calculating the cost per call. It's crucial to keep track of cost per call over time to see if it's improving or worse. Call centers can use cost per call as a benchmarking tool to compare their operations to those of other call centers.
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Adherence to Schedule
This indicator shows how much time an agent spends dealing with a customer on the call. An increase in Missed and Abandon Call rates equals a low schedule adherence score. This significantly affects Customer Satisfaction and Net Promoter Scores.
There is no guarantee whether or not a call center will meet its service level targets if it adheres to its timetable rigidly. Even with the best schedule adherence, service level attainment may be jeopardized if call volume forecasts are inaccurate. However, if agents stick to their allotted phone time and their availability to take calls, it may help the organization to improve service levels.
Read More: The Top 10 Call Center Metrics Everyone Should Know!
Putting it all together…
So there you have it: the top ten key performance indicators (KPIs) or metrics for measuring the call center performance accurately. Hopefully, this post will help you measure your call centers performance accurately. Besides these, there are plenty of other call center indicators to measure call center services performance, but you don't need all of them. It's easy to monitor and streamline call center operations; all you need is to have the perfect balance of KPIs.
To outsource the best call center in India, you can also contact our team at Go4Customer. Having been in the industry for years, we have been helping businesses get the best call center services.
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