What is one of the most effective ways to evaluate the performance of a call center? The answer to the suggested question is as follows: successful implementation of the balanced scorecard system will help you analyze the work of your company and measure the productivity of your workforce in the best way.
Metrics evaluation cycle
The main task of any call canter is to provide fruitful interaction between businesses (banks, computer hardware companies, utility organizations etc.) and their customers. At present, we may differentiate between two main types of call centers – those that receive incoming calls from people who need to have their problems solved, and those that make outbound calls to the company’s prospects.
Call center managers who wish to ensure its effective performance, need to find a proper balance between the level of servicing and cost-effectiveness of the process. As a rule, customers do not wish to be on hold for a long period of time waiting for their calls to be answered. Therefore, the number of call center agents should ideally correspond to the amount of calls they can manage during a working day. It is easy to assume that a low amount of employees will result in the reduction of their productivity, while the excessive number of call center agents will lead to the increased expenditures. Therefore, managers of these organizations should be primarily concerned with looking for reasonable ways out of this situation.
Major call center KPIs
Generally, call centers apply diverse forecasting methods to define the approximate number of employees needed for a specified time interval. Such techniques are primarily used to define the intensity and duration of call traffic at any particular hour. This is where they face serious complications, because the amount of calls may range according to the time of the day and even the season. The most effective solution in this respect is to analyze previous data.
As far as call center managers are initially concerned with the level of customer satisfaction, they tend to foresee the behavior of their potential clients. They realize that if their customers have to wait for an agent’s response during a long period of time, they will be more likely to use the services of another call center next time. Therefore, they consider it important to implement performance evaluation systems, which will help them measure such metrics as average handling time, the amount of calls handled during an hour, average talk time, cost per one call, the approximate time of delay, rate of first call resolution etc. Balanced scorecard (BSC) is one of such measurement systems, which is reported to be highly effective in this particular industry nowadays. It helps analyze the overall productivity and performance of a call center and define whether it needs improvement or not.