The term Cost of Delay (CoD) is a framework set to measure the delay in a launch of any product, entity, or product, and the loss associated with it. It has different connotations depending on the type of industry your company belongs to. In call centers, it is generally the delay in complying with a new strategy or attending calls that are already in the queue. To put it simply, in a customer-oriented business, any customer who lands on the portal inquiring about some detail, they are business prospect without a doubt.
Customers seek assistance via the website or toll-free number provided by the business. It doesn’t matter how big or trivial their inquiry is, once they approach us, it is a window of opportunity for pitching sales. While assisting the customer, there is always room for sharing the benefits of the company’s products and services. Although it depends on the agent's skillset to convert the potential customer into a buyer, it is always worth a shot.
Having said that, businesses can’t afford to lose any opportunity to interact with their customers. Cost of Delay (CoD) is the metric that measures how many customers left the conversation without even having it initiated in the first place.
When a customer waits in the queue for longer and leaves it due to the delay in getting assistance from an agent, a prospective buyer is lost. It tantamounts to a loss in business.
Therefore, it is critical for every call center to maintain sufficient bandwidth between the agents so that they don’t miss any caller (potential buyer). Cost of Delay (CoD) actively measures the time a caller spent in the queue to get assistance.
Also, it provides insightful information about the customer's patience while they were waiting. How late is too late? Is the number of agents large enough to handle the customer traffic coming on a daily basis? Should the number of agents be increased? Or can we manage the call traffic by improving the call efficiency?
Most importantly, Cost of Delay (CoD) is a framework that could be quite intricate in the eyes of managers contemplating the loss. It is because first, they need to estimate the conversion rate of a potential customer landing on the company’s portal on a daily basis.
Then using CoD we can measure how many customers leave the queue without speaking with the agents. By collating and comparing the conversion rate and the number of customers leaving the conversation, we can estimate how much prospective business has been lost.
Conclusion: Hence, the Cost of Delay is an important framework every call center company must evaluate regularly. It helps in ruling out how much potential business we have in the company.
Keeping the concept in mind, call center agencies maintain consistency in answering the calls of the customer religiously. It is also part of several aspects that contribute to the improvement of customer experience.
The rate of Cost of Delay must be kept as low as possible and that is why the managers and lead leaders of call center agencies put special effort into attending to every single customer landing on their page for assistance.
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