Call Center Metrics

Call centers have become a very important aspect for the development of a business organization. The very essential need of fulfilling the communication channel between the consumers and the company is achieved by this call centers. Call centers is basically a open work place where number of employees together work on a computerized network to deal with the incoming and outgoing information. Call centers are owned and operate by a company whose functionality is based on the product support and information inquiries by the consumers.

Call centers hire hundreds and thousands of employees to deal with various consumers and their queries. Separate sections are allotted to each of the employee depending on his skills. The whole workplace is connected with a single queued network to trace each and every possible detail regarding consumers and employees.

Call centers can be of various types, depending on need and proliferation of the company. Inbound and outbound call centers are the two basic types. Calls made by the consumers to obtain product related information or report a complain about product malfunctioning is termed as inbound calls, where as calls made by the employees to the consumers to convey them about the latest product details are termed as outbound calls. Hence call centers can work on either work on inbound calls or outbound calls or both. Call centers are very often organized in a multi-tier help desk support system to deal with the consumers more efficiently. As there are various wings and section of a call centers pertaining to various products, hence as an inbound call is entertained by the operator, the call is transferred to the respective wing that can provide adequate support to that particular employee. If it required further more details than the call is forwarded to the second tier and then third tier and so on. Mostly the third tier consists of highly skilled and trained engineers or developers that can surely sort out the product related issue.

Call center agents don’t always have their physical presence in the work place, rather various agents’ work from their home with the use of internet technologies. These remote agents are hired as per their performance and technical skills. Owing to a sudden increase in need of employees, some temporary agents are also hired who are being paid for the time they spend in workplace. Now days, virtual call centers are also in action. These are the small call centers situated at different locations and are connected through a common platform on internet.

Key-performance indicator, KPI is the latest technology that are broadly is use by these call centers. They provide some financial or non financial metrics that enables a collective measurement of overall growth of a business organization. A balanced scorecard is made as per the performance index of the employee, which helps in assessing the overall work efficiency. Various other technologies like, automatic call distribution management, agent performance analyst, average handle time, automatic number identification , also helps in achieving the targeted growth of a company.