Determining Better ‘Talk Time’ With Scorecards

The success factors in any business depend on, how efficiently the overall operations, activities and methodologies are constructed. They should not only ensure cost- effectiveness, but utilize the best of human and technological resources. How well the workers of an entity perform is directly linked to what resources are provided to them, how aptly challenging and skill-stretching their tasks is, how well motivated they are and what are the company policies that ascertain employee retain over a productive number of years.

Like any other business entity, the domain of a call-center success falls in the same criterion. With its distinct work environment overloaded with data and resources, how well they are channelized to obtain the maximum, is the key to triumph. Most of the time the information is segregated among individuals who are handling an entire classification of queries and making inbound and out bound calls for this need. This makes it absolutely necessary to gauge the performance of the overall operations in a call-center.

Both technological resources and staff are abundant in a call-center, hence, abuse or neglect in handling any of these can result in inefficiencies that would later be the crucial stimulators of deterioration in the productivity of an organization. This is the reason organizations are depending heavily on well integrated support systems as Balanced Scorecard. One such issue that can be tackled effectively but is mostly overlooked, includes calculating efficient-average of ‘Talk Time’. By definition talk time is; the tenure or time limit for which a call center agent was engaged in a transaction. It starts from the time of acquaintance i.e. a simple ‘hello’ and ends upon the closing note which is ‘goodbye’ in almost all cases. In customer relationship management, it is the significant time when valuable information can be extracted from the customers and is expressed in terms of average minutes.

With the use of balanced scorecards, talk time per call can be improved by twenty to thirty seconds per call. More improvements can be ascertained if better controls are assigned using the weights and indicators. This allows proper understanding of call time requirements throughout the front-line managers who are directly communicating through this tool. With the help of metrics, average time duration assigned can be compared to the current average call duration. Another useful tool balanced scorecard offers is the Balancing Tree with the help of which goals (i.e. reducing call time) and the weight assigned to this task or any other can be measured. For example if X task has weight defined to be 4 and Z task has weight of 6, then the task with more weight shall be considered more significant.

This will help the organization build sound strategies that will assist in building towering corporations of tomorrow. They key issues that can be handled using scorecards for this purpose include; improvised call agent capabilities, better contact process and efficient systems support.

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