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.