Call Center Metrics

Imagine that your company sells high quality products or services, has an excellent IT and human resource department, your products are well known in the market, but there is one problem – you cannot handle all calls from customers or your customer support service lacks professional call center operators.  In course of time people will refuse to buy your products and services of not because they don’t like them but because they know you will not offer any support to them.  As a result, sales growth will slow down and gradually decrease.  So, despite having professional managerial staff and the best strategy, you won’t be able to achieve positive sales results.

Call center tracks customers from intention to buy to purchase and post sale service

Call center is an important business unit in any company that offers products and services to potential customers.  Once a customer has purchased a product he may have some questions or problems with it, and a call center operator seems to be the only person who can resolve such problems.  Very often customers form their judgment and image of the company based on their communication experience with call center tech specialists.

If you’re calling your web-hosting company or Internet Service provider and you failed to get answers to your questions you will probably think about changing your web-host or ISP.  The same concerns producers of laptops, cell phones etc.

That’s why it is extremely important to measure efficiency of a call center.  Moreover, it is imperative to align call center goals and measures with the company strategy.  In other words, and ordinary call center operator should look at a strategy map and understand how improvements and his performance will contribute to implementation of strategic goals.  If everyone in a call center has a clear understanding of the company strategy, the personnel will be motivated to use balanced scorecard.

This is how callcenter works

One of the most common mistakes in balance scorecard implementation in call centers and customer support services is the focus on number of calls handled by a single operator.  Of the problem is that a call center operator may handle 200 calls a day but solve only 10 problems.  The goal of customer support service is to solve customer problems but not just answer phone and say “Yes, we understand your problem and we’re looking for solutions.”

That’s why, it is imperative to choose the right indicators that will measure progress in implementation of call centers strategic goals.  To achieve that BSC team leaders should attract ordinary personnel to strategy development.

A call center plays an important rule in the work of any company that sells products or services.  It is but the work of a call center or a customer support service that real and potential customers for their judgment about the company.  What do you usually do when you have questions or concerns about purchased products or services?  Of course, you call customer support service with the hope to get your questions answered and problems solved.  Call centers may have different goals and purposes in different companies.  Some businesses use call centers to sell products and services while others employ the phone operators to provide customers with ongoing support and guidance.  If you called customer support service and your questions were not answered you would probably think that it was not worth to deal with such a company.  The thus, you are a lost customer for such a business.  Of the innards of economy it is very unwise to lose customers because of poor quality services.

A call center, as in any aspect and elemental business structure, needs to be measured and evaluated.  Business up performance measurement is used to help company reach strategic goals.  In this sense, balanced scorecard is a number one tool that communicates operational management with the company strategic vision.  Of the balanced scorecard evaluates key performance indicators, also known as KPI.  Call center has own set of KPIs that represents its performance.

Call center metrics has own specific character as the process of calling involves two parties: the caller and the operator.  The caller has to be satisfied with his call while the operator needs to do everything to resolve problems as soon as possible.

Major call center kpi

So, what are major KPIs for call center?

1. Revenue per successful call.  If the call center has commercial goals it needs to sell as much as possible.  By increasing this KPI top management of the company increases revenue.
2. Cost per call. Logically, the less money a company spends to answer one call, the more efficiently it works. However, here one should be reasonable, and excessive economy and saving may result in poor quality service.
3. Conversion rate. This is % of call that ended up with successful sales.
4. Average call handling time. The less time an operator needs to answer one call, the better for the company and callers.
5. First resolutions calls rate. This is % of calls during which the problems were solved at once (customer do not have to call again).

How a call center contributes to success of the company

What is most important in business? Of course, any business must have an effective business model. How can you see if your business is effective? Sure, you need to run it. But it may happens that in course of time business models that were effective a year ago prove to be absolutely useless in new reality. In order to implement a new strategy one needs to know what did not work in the previous plan.

This is called evaluation of business performance. In order to get a full picture of business performance, certain indicators need to be analyzed. These indicators give answers to question: “How well is business/company doing.” Every business has own set of key performance indicators (KPI). Of course, many of them have much in common, while some have a very specific character attributed to certain business types.

Every company needs to take care of relations with its customer. Even if a customer does not buy from your company, you need to stay in touch with him. Customer relationship management (crm) is a very popular strategy of marketing products and working with customers. A loyal customer is the best customer a company can have.

Evaluate crm ratios to improve business performance

What is the main communication means between a business and a customer? Of course, this is contact center. If you have questions about quality of a product you never call company’s CEO. As a rule you dial a long toll free number and talk to a call center operator. Your judgment about the company is formed by how you talk to a call center representative. It means that a call center should work perfectly, or be striving to work perfectly.

Before implementing any strategy (including crm) a manager needs to know what goes wrong in current business. It is impossible to expand a call center if it is working inefficiently at the moment. Small problems will turn into big ones.

CRM ratios and call center metrics

Balanced Scorecard is the tool which will help you evaluate economic performance of a call center to find weak and strong points. Armed with figures and graphs you can easily see the trends and plan work of a call center for some time ahead.

Besides, Balanced Scorecard system will make your operators more self-confident as they will be aware of own mistakes and weak point. This will results in better personnel performance and thus, better performance of the entire call center.

Modern business undergoes a very difficult stage of development. The worst economic crisis has hurt thousands or perhaps millions of businesses all over the world. In the post crisis economy suffering even minor losses or inefficient spending of money means that your business will not survive for a long time.

Thus, in order to make sure you are not losing hard earned profits or wasting money you could have invested in your business, one needs to evaluate it and find all strengths and weaknesses to develop a comprehensive strategic development plan.

Most companies have call centers which either sell products/services or provide customers with support and guidance. Customer support services should employ only competent operators who know the subject matter (for example, network technologies if this is a web hosting provider). You cannot afford having an ineffective call center as your customers may turn with their backs to you and your company which will be a disaster.

To properly evaluate performance of your call center it is not enough just to calculate revenue or total expenses related to maintaining it. Of course, these figures will tell you much but they will not tell you what caused negative performance of a call center. In such a case an effective and progressive manager should use Balanced Scorecard system.

Call center benchmar will indicate business performance

Which call center benchmark to use to evaluate overall performance?

What is it? In order to better explain it, let’s take a hypothetic example of an imaginary call center. So, you are a top manager in the call center who needs to know what goes wrong with it. You are armed with basic figures like net loss or revenue, number of call answered for a certain period, number of employees etc. All these figures can say just one: something is wrong.

Balanced Scorecard system is represented by software that takes all these figures into account to evaluate all key performance indicators (KPI). KPIs are factors that influence business performance, in our case call center performance.

You will be surprised at how efficiently the program can work. You will get to know about all weaknesses in the company which you will be able to address directly. Besides, your employees will know what they are doing wrong which will contribute to motivation, self-confidence and positive organization climate.

Balanced Scorecard system and call center metrics are the best tools to evaluate performance of a call center, optimize its work and improve indicators.

Much in your company will depend on call center performance, of course of you have any. But usually, well reputed companies always have a call center. Operators either place orders or consult customers on different issues. Thus, a call center may have two major goals: sell products and services by phone, and provide customers with ongoing support.

If your call center shows poor performance this may result in: a) decrease of revenue since operators will sell less products/services by phone, b) low customer satisfaction which may result in customer churn, while new customer are unlikely to buy from you if they did not like their conversation with a call center operator.

So, as you can see, you can be the best manager in the entire world, but your call center may spoil just everything you managed to accomplish. You need to keep your nose to the wind, or in other words regularly evaluate performance of your call center to be aware of most serious problems and hardships in work.

In order to be well informed on strengths and weaknesses of your call center, you should definitely use Balanced Scorecard system. Specialized software will do all the job for you. All the program needs is figures, like average time of one call, total expenses related to call center maintenance etc.

Test call center performance with Balanced Scorecard software

Use call center metrics to evaluate call center performance

Balanced Scorecard concept employs the ideal of evaluating separate indicators which altogether represent overall performance of a company. In case of a call center these are special indicators that show how well your operators cope with their job.

There are not many of such KPIs (key performance indicators) related to call center metrics. However, it is very important to pick the most valuable ones. If you focus on secondary factors, you are risking to waste money for nothing.

So, be careful when picking the right KPIs. This list will surely help you make the right decisions and properly evaluate call center performance.

Concentrate on cost per call as too expensive calls make take your company down. There are many ways to reduce cost per call, however, you need to make sure your operators get proper compensation.

Customer satisfaction is another indicator which is very important to any call center manager. Angry customers rarely become loyal to a company. So, all questions of callers need to be answered.

First resolution calls. These calls are called one and done calls. It means that a customer needs only one call to resolve his/her problems.

Imagine you want to purchase a laptop, or buy web hosting plan from a web hosting provider. You have found numerous web sites with attractive offers. But, perhaps, the first thing you will do is finding a toll free number to which you can call and ask questions about the products and services you are about to buy. So, basically, your decision to buy products/services pretty much depends on how successful your call to the company will be.

Why did we start this article with hypothetic situation? It is to describe how important a call center is. It does not matter what goals a call center pursue it is definitely a mediator between customers and business itself. Call center operators are soldiers who are located at the forefront of a business. These are the people who persuade potential customers buy products and services, and thus they generate income.

It is important to feel sure that a call center works perfectly. Sure, there are no perfect things, and if you are aspiring to perfection you will most certainly succeed. In order to develop and expand any business, one should first evaluate it. The same concerns call center. If you plan to increase the number of operators or organize training sessions, you fist need to evaluate current performance to find strengths and weaknesses.

Using Balanced Scorecard system you will be able to perform evaluation of call center performance within a short period of time. With the help of automated software it is possible to find out all weak and strong point. The program will provide you with results in form of graphs, figures and percents.

Start with support control in evaluation of call center performance

Support control is one of the ways to monitor call center performance

What exactly does Balanced Scorecard system evaluate? There is such a notion as key performance indicator. In case of a call center, these are indicators that directly influence work of a call center, thus making it either effective or ineffective.

So, if you want to organize support control you need to take into account the following KPIs (key performance indicators):

1. Revenue per successful call. Balanced Scorecard system will divide total revenue generated by call center operators by total number of calls. If it turns out that net revenue per successful call is lower than cost per call, your call center does a poor job.
2. Cost per call. This is the amount of money you have to spend to answer one call.
3. Customer satisfaction. Ask your customers to rate calls. Satisfied customers turn into the most loyal customers of your company.

Evaluation of business performance can be one of the most difficult and daunting tasks. Net revenue rate is a good indicator, however, there are so many factors that influence business performance and measure success. At that, each business has own factors and indicators. A retail sales company will take care of sales rate while a customer support service should focus on customer satisfaction and first call resolution.

It should be noted that all respected and trusted companies have own call centers, no matter what kind of business they run. Naturally, current, former and potential customers have questions and concerns related to products and services they have purchased or are about to purchase. A call center is a linking element between business and its customers.

It is very important that your call center does not scare customers away. You need to understand that this is your business face. It is a call center operator that represents the company during the call. A caller does not know what a good person CEO or head manager is. A caller judge the company by a conversation with a call center operator.

Without any doubt, an effective manager needs to evaluate performance of a call center to find solutions to existing problems. We recommend use of Balanced Scorecard system which is a special program that performs calculations to evaluate business performance by KPI (key performance indicators). As already said above, each business has different KPIs, and call center is not an exception here. There are certain factors and indicators that make work of a call center effective and efficient.

Request kpi is an inseparable part of call center metrics

Evaluate performance of call center with request kpi

Balanced Scorecard system will help you detect the problems before they have harmful consequences for your business. Call center metrics include numerous KPIs, but some of them are very important both for callers and call center operators.

There is one common thing about all businesses. An enterprise must be profitable. In case of a call center, this business should make profits if this is a sales call center. In case of customer support service, we cannot talk about profitability. However, effective customer support service contributes to overall performance of business.

Balanced Scorecard system will help you evaluate such indicators as cost per call, revenue per successful call (if this is a sales call center), customer and employees satisfaction, time on hold (time a customer spends waiting for a specialist competent in his problem), blockage and abandoned calls rate, number of one and done calls etc.

Balanced Scorecard is an inseparable element of a manager’s tool kit. This software will make it possible to improve business performance and develop future development plans.

There are a number of ways to measure call center performance, but a few should be enough to give you the most useful results.

Call centers are becoming very important to the operations of many companies. Call centers provide them the ability to connect with customers more effectively and efficiently and allow them to focus more on developing products that consumers will find useful. Ultimately, the most accurate way to measure call center performance is to relate it to how well call center services contribute to improvement in terms of company sales and product quality. However, this is largely dependent on the way companies analyze and utilize call center generated data.

For a call center, the process of measuring performance can be a bit complicated since as a separate company, it has its own performance measures. These measures, however, must be flexible enough to accommodate the expected outputs of clients. And call centers may be servicing a couple or more clients at any given time.

Depending on the requirements of client companies or accounts, call centers employ several performance measures common to the industry. They can employ average talk time (ATT), average handling time (AHT), percentage of resolved issues, service level, cost-per-call, abandon rate, customer satisfaction, and delay time, which refer to the time spent by customers waiting for call center representative to pick up their calls.

These different measures make it easier to assess the performance of the center itself, although other measures are needed to come up with a complete and more reliable assessment of performance. Favorable results in the evaluation of these measures do not automatically mean success; they must contribute to the operations of the client’s accounts. The number of measures employed also does not matter much –, what is more important is the relevance of said measures. A few will do the trick as long as they have the ability to capture performance levels accurately and effectively.

Among the different techniques enumerated above, customer satisfaction is perhaps the best when it comes to measuring performance. This is because customer satisfaction is the ultimate objective of any company, including a call center. The levels of customer satisfaction mostly stem from the quality of product or services being offered; thus, it is a good gauge of how well the center is performing or the quality of the clients’ products and services.

Negative customer satisfaction evaluation results tell a lot about the performance of the center and product of the company. Other measurement metrics will be helpful in providing details to the evaluation. Abandon rate, for example, tells how many customers decide to abandon calls they themselves initiated. Clients cannot be expected to wait patiently until somebody picks up their calls. A few of these and you can expect to receive negative feedback from them, and complaints are decidedly clear manifestations of dissatisfaction that does not bode well for the call center as well as its clients. Abandon rates may be caused by long lines of customers calling. It is very important to determine the reasons behind high abandon rates so that solutions can be found and applied.

There are many techniques used to measure call center performance. The number employed is not as important as the quality of metrics utilized to measure the performance.

As successful as call centers may be today, there is still a need to manage and control call center performance. Here are some tips on how to do this.

The call center industry has been experiencing boom after boom for so many years now. This is a strong indication that there is much revenue to be earned in this industry! And for the many investors considering delving into the call center industry, you must be prepared to tackle every single aspect to be tackled, just to ensure the success of your call center. Yes, call centers are indeed quite successful these days. But this does not go without much effort from the many people behind it, as well as the different technologies that support the operations of such centers!

The typical call center does not just cater to the needs of one client. In fact, in the most common setting, a call center could very well cater to the needs of banks, travel agencies, financial institutions, and the like. And these establishments have different needs and operations to handle. The call center itself would then have to hire different sets of representatives who would then be trained to handle the problems and issues the customers of these clients would be calling about. Let us say that a call center has an Internet Service Provider for a client.

The call center would then have to hire representatives who would have sufficient background and experience when it comes to the technologies and such in providing Internet services. The same call center could then have a financial institution for a second client. The representatives hired for this account should then have a certain level of background in accounting or banking and finance. Thus, there is a need for any call center to be very flexible when it comes to catering to the individual needs of their clients. So, what can be done to manage and control call center performance?

The perfect approach to take here is actually the Balanced Scorecard. This is actually metrics and metrics management combined. The metrics to be used here should represent the business in its entirety. These include the calls, the operators, the expenses incurred, and the revenue gained. In managing these metrics, the proper order should be implemented. But it is equally important to keep the number of metrics to be used at a moderate level. So, just choose the metrics that are relevant to your business as a call center.

You should also have a financial perspective when deciding which metrics to use here. Most call centers actually perceive that more revenue is garnered with more calls. But this is not true at all. This is not just about making as many calls as possible. There are also conversion rates to consider, as well as maintaining costs at the lowest possible rate.

Next to consider are the internal processes. Just how is a phone call handled in your very own call center? How do the queues of calls go about? Is there a particular segmentation of incoming calls that takes place? How long is the call-handling time that you perceive as average? And what about your service window? Is it available 24/7? These are just some of the questions you need to ask when it comes to the internal processes of your call center. By keeping these things in mind, the plan to managing and controlling the functions entailed in maintaining call centers is indeed made easier to achieve.