Call Center Metrics

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.