These days almost all big (and even small) companies have their own call centers or use services of external call centers who handle customers’ calls. You would probably never buy a product or a service is you know that there is no phone number of a hotline. This mostly concern service providers, like web hosting or ISP companies. However, even companies offering products have hotlines to answer questions coming from their numerous customers. We got used to the fact that if we have certain questions related to products or services we have just purchased we can always call a hotline number and ask questions that will be supposedly answered.
Overview of call center KPIs
However, it sometimes happens that customers never receive any answers or simply get tired of waiting for response, so they hang up. In such a case a call center does not only fulfill its duties but worsen overall performance of a company. Every company aims at retaining customers. It means that if a customer has purchased a laptop of a certain brand he will most certainly buy the same brand laptop next time when he decided to get a new one for himself or for his friends. Regular customers are supreme goal of every producer. Post sale service is one of the major conditions forming customer loyal attitude towards the company. For this reason, a perfectly functioning call center or a customer support service is a must. How to gain perfection? We suggest using Balanced Scorecard in to optimize call center performance and align call center goals with company values, mission and strategy. Balanced Scorecard is just a perfect strategic management and performance evaluation tool for a call center since this is the most customer oriented business unit in the company since call center operators directly contact with customers, and thus are aware of the most common problems, difficulties, questions and concerns.
What is BSC success?
Balanced Scorecard works in the 4 categories: financial, customer, internal business processes, learning and growth. A call center BSC is a classical one which mean it does not go beyond these 4 categories. Each category contains KPIs (key performance indicators) which represent critical success factors for the call center excellent functioning. It should be noticed that KPIs and BSC categories are interrelated which means that excellent indicators in financial category depend on achievements in other BSC categories. Among the most important KPIs in a call center BSC are average cost per call, average revenue per call, abandoned calls rate, one and done calls rate, average number of questions answered and problems solved, number of calls handled by one operator per hour etc.