Nowadays a call center is much more than just a company that receives phone calls from the customers and resolves their queries. It is an individual business, which should obligatory generate profit. Therefore, it should help the managers of the company attract new clients, set and achieve business objectives and implement fresh and extraordinary ideas. A reputable call center should operate round the clock so that the customers could be able to get valuable live responses without having to wait for a long time. Well, this may sound too ideally, but this is exactly what a trustworthy company should be focused at.
The efficiency of the call center functioning may be generally analyzed from the point of view of its managers, operators and, of course, customers. The latter use the services of these companies to have their problems resolved. Therefore, operators try their best effort to ensure quick and effective customer support. Their main task is to search for the required information and offer it to the clients. Managers, in their turn, should focus on making the whole process quick and trouble-free. This is where call center metrics may come in handy.
Basically, the whole system of call center management may be analyzed by means of implementing the so-called “balanced scorecard” concept. It is nothing more than just a set of metrics and basic rules of their management. How should these metrics be established properly? Let us try to find that out. To start with, the company’s management should realize that there is no sense in developing and implementing an excessive number of these metrics. Instead, there should be a particular amount of them grouped in proper order. Make sure the metrics you are going to analyze represent the main elements of your business, namely the characteristics of the calls, the operators’ productivity, expenses and profits etc.
The BSC (Balanced Scorecard) system implies using 4 main perspectives to analyze the functioning of your business. These include financial, internal process, learning and growth, and, of course, customer perspectives. Each of them, in its turn, uses specific metrics. Thus, financial perspective implies that any call center should generate income. Otherwise, there is no sense in its functioning. The internal process perspective applies metrics to analyze the process and average time of handling incoming phone calls. The proficiency and skillfulness of the company’s personnel is one of the most decisive factors here. If managers realize that their employees lack particular skills, they should immediately improve the situation by means of providing adequate training. This is what learning and growth perspective is about. The leader of the team should use proven training techniques (such as role-playing activities, remote listening methods, group trainings etc.) and measure their effectiveness.
Customer satisfaction is what contributes to the company’s popularity and profitability. So, it is impossible to analyze its performance without considering the customer perspective, which involves the following metrics: the amount and quality of response time, first call resolution and customer loose rates etc.
In case the improvement of your business performance is a burning issue for you, then you will not go without learning the basics of establishing call center metrics. This is the only possible way to get the desired revenue.