What is Performance Standards?

Performance standard is defined as a management-approved expression to specify and quantify performance thresholds, performance requirements, and performance expectations that must be met adeptly to ensure efficient accomplishments of business-specific functions. These standards are primarily used in employee performance plans, and all the critical elements that can quantify employees, performance are included in the standards. Performance standard helps businesses in analyzing the performance of employees, and how much their performance and efficiency have deviated from specified plans. Using these standards, companies can make efficient performance based on appraisal decisions.

There are plenty of call center service providers as well as business vendors that make use of performance standards to help the employees develop an exhaustive understanding regarding their duty and responsibilities. This way, call center service providers to educate their staff regarding the significance of maintaining performance thresholds, requirements, and expectations. This certainly helps in accomplishing outsourced business functions adeptly, besides ensuring proficient outcomes and results to clients. To ensure the same, performance standards must be measurable, realistic, and objective. As this is quite a tricky task to write performance standards, plenty of businesses seek assistance and guidance from outside companies. More importantly, performance standards should also include the critical measurable items required to appraise performance. Therefore, call center India ensures measurable performance standards. This helps them in not only monitoring the overall quality standards of call center services. To ensure efficient performance standards, call centers in India pay special attention to:

Quality: This performance standards metric refers to the accuracy, effectiveness, and relevance of business information that call center agents share with customers.

Quantity: This is somewhat related to telemarketing firms or outbound contact centers, as the performance of agents in outbound call centers is evaluated on the basis of quantity of sales.

Time: This performance standards metric refers to how quickly an agent has provided efficient solutions to customers through services rendered by inbound call centers or outbound call centers. Average handle time is the total duration of one customer transaction. It includes hold time, talk time, and follow-up tasks that are involved in the transaction. A good average handling time provided by the call center is 6 minutes 3 seconds.

First Contact Resolution (FCR): It is one of the important performance standards metric. FCR indicates a contact center’s ability to resolve a customer’s issues for the first time they call. In today’s omnichannel contact center milieu, it’s not always easy to measure FCR, since it can be difficult to gauge which interaction was truly the customer’s first contact. Normally, the industry benchmark for FCR is 70-75%.

Case Escalation: It refers to escalation from an agent to a supervisor. This is an issue that needs to be tackled on priority because it could indicate serious gaps in agent’s skills or training.

QA Scoring: QA scoring is a way to access a call center’s call quality. It involves analyzing recorded calls and comparing them with preset standards around courteousness, professionalism, greetings, etc. This performance standards metric is a very popular metric with an accepted industry of 75-90% scoring 4 random calls per month.

Net Promoter Score (NPS): Generally, any net promoter scores above zero would be considered good. But below indicates that the company needs to start improving and understanding customer satisfaction levels.