It is impossible to imagine a modern company that offers products of services without competent and efficient customer support service. Moreover, as online sales are becoming increasingly popular, call center has gained tremendous popularity. Sales by phone have become a norm of today’s life. It is so convenient! However, an inefficient call center or customer support service may take the company down, thus hampering its progress on the way to implement strategic goals and gain considerable competitive advantage. In this article we will talk about call center BSC, implementation tips and most popular KPIs.
Tasks and goals of call centers
Implementation process of a call center BSC starts with development of realistic and comprehensive strategy. It is vitally important to get the entire personnel involved in strategy discussion. Of course, there are no ideal situations, and not all employees are very loyal and dedicated. However, top management should do everything possible to motivate personnel and get employees involved in strategy discussion. The point is that ordinary call center operators know very much about problems of their department, as well as most common problems of customers. Thus, if a call center is designing a strategy, opinions of ordinary managers and call center operators who are at frontline, are very valuable.
Then comes choice of key performance indicators. It is difficult to say what stage is the most important. However, it would be fair to say that selection of KPIs is one of the most important stages of BSC implementation. This especially concerns call center BSC since this business unit is customer oriented. It also does not produce anything which sometimes causes serious losses. Key performance indicators represent critical success factors in various aspects of running business.
Why is optimization of call center performance effective?
Popular call center KPIs include cost per call, first resolution calls rate, time on hold, number of calls handled by one operator, abandoned calls rate and many others. It is impossible to develop a universal set of key performance indicators that will work equally well for every call center. Every business unit is individual. Every call center or a helpdesk has unique structure and problems. Still, it is rather reasonable to use sets of key performance indicators specifically created for a call center. Some KPIs are fairly universal such as cost per call or customer satisfaction. Correct measurement of such KPI will offer call center managers valuable information on progress of their business unit in terms of strategic goals implementation.
Tags: call center evaluation, call center KPIs, Call Center Metrics