Call Center Metrics

Call centers are hubs where thousands of calls are handled everyday to be answered for their queries. This suggests that proper alignment of time is of utmost importance for managers in such a place. Thus, by structuring metrics aimed at ensuring regular following of processes that occur at call center, one can resolve the issue of ‘performance management’.

One can assign values to these indicators and ensure that actual values are well within the pre-decided range. By doing this, it will be possible to keep things in control and improve situations gradually.

The act of identifying call centre metrics however has to be a very tactical one as wrong selection can fall severely heavy on organizational operations in the long run. This set of parameters thus, can help sail through the sea of uncertainty and turbulence in a pretty easy and smooth manner.

To say it all, one can get over the difficult issues of call centers in a quantitative manner and emerge a winner with this balanced scorecard. However, this act of devising parameters is a thoughtful one and should be carried out with care as any wrong decision can take a toll on the previously fine running processes.

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.

With the rapidly changing dynamics of the marketplaces today, the call centers have covered by leaps and bounds the drift between organization and their diversity needs. It is a consolidated office well-equipped with tools which are essential for transmitting and receiving large volume of information, queries and communication means. It involves entertaining incoming calls for queries and issues regarding a particular product or service. However, it can also be used for the purpose of making outbound calls to serve needs as; telemarketing, debt collection and promotions etc. Other devices that have become an integral part of a call center include mailing and fulfillment, live online chat support, emails and faxes etc.

Within a call center open workspaces are provided to a number of agents individually, along with a telephone and headset. It can be monitored and managed independently but more often is linked to a corporate support system. For such an environment where data is random and in abundance it is crucial to structure an implementation design that guarantees maximum data management. Control over data within an organization will prove to be as successful for present as it would be for future. For this reason business entities are relying on effective support systems that ensure to preserve data for current trend-watching and analyses. One such support system is the Balanced Scorecard that allows organizations to research and study in detail random data to interpret it as useful information.

For efficiency management it is empirical that the related processes should be identified, the key areas are measured and result is communicated throughout the firm for better understanding. With the staff grouped in varying tiers a support system works coherently managing and handling calls according to the flow. The information retrieved or yielded during these calls is categorized and saved in the central databases. However this is not the only function balanced scorecard is helpful in. It encompasses other related departments and their activities like; services, product development and system improvisation etc.

How it is conducted is very simple. Metrics are used as indicators to visualize the projection. These metrics are number based and important for assessing the performance of a business entity. It helps corporations to plan, control and organize their business operations. These metrics are grouped together but can be used only once and not duplicated.

For various organizations it helps focus on varying issues. These performance and efficiency metrics enable studies, productive time and corporate management to become a relatively easier task. Thus enabling these customer interaction centers to gather valuable information regarding; policies, performances, tasks and better employee and customer relationship management for the purpose of utilizing this to build their resource pool in future.

Most corporate enterprises make use of call centers to interact with their potential target market. The count of such examples is endless ranging from; customer support to mailing and fulfillment. With call centers operations expanding some entities even opt to manage their internal functions and routine tasks like technical support and help desks through it.  Businesses even service internal functions through call centers. Examples of this include help desks, retail financial support, and sales support. In such organization managers are the best sales agents of the firm. They serve in the front line and take to problem resolution, communication, satisfying and sales of any product or service. Hence, knowing what are the stronger areas of the firm is as important as knowing where businesses are slacking from.

To best combat this challenge Balanced Score card come equipped with solutions and tools to measure, plan, control, device the performance agents using its unique set of metrics. It can be used along the hierarchy of organization assisting the lower level management with performance measures and the high level with a viewpoint from varying angle that will help satisfy the stakeholders to the maximum and provide a clarified view of the operational tasks within an organization.

The operations, activities and tasks within call centers are defined using number based scoring system. The widely arrayed task ranging from promotion to post service poses challenges of the management that relate to technology and staffing field. It is of high concern that organizations   develop an adequately powerful knowledge-pool about the various aspects involved in customer service to aptly resolve the concerns that keep springing up now and again.

Structuring relevant KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) on scorecard helps in tracking the potential areas in the form of indicators to which ‘target’ and ‘actual’ values can be assigned.

These metrics that can be incorporated and related to the levels that need to be studied in a given circumstance. The operations within a call center are dependent on two types of calls namely; inbound calls and outbound calls. Inbound are the ones that are done by customers for having information about the operations, thereby giving it the shape of help-desk. Outbound calls, however, are made to people for the purpose of selling or promoting products or services to them. These two categories with numerous tasks assigned can be managed better with the help of scorecards.

Balanced Scorecards also offer ideas of presenting that are appealing and logical. For example its use of stop lights which are indicated as a red, yellow or green triangle and appear next to the metrics that require attention, which can be adjusted according to specific performances and turned off as well. These spot lights can also be used in the reports for the purpose of data communication. This allows data to become easy to be tracked and comparable against defined measures of calculation.

Call centers shoulder an important responsibility of converting leads into customers. Thus, the callers are expected to get maximum from the available lists.This in turn requires the managers to proceed in as flawless manner as possible. One of the ways by which this can be established is bringing the BSC (Balanced Scorecard) in scenario. This serves as a reservoir of metrics to be used further for tracking of steps, that too on a continuous basis.

To initiate with its usage, one is required to identify and filter the parameters so as to create a set of parameters for unbiased following of the developments as they occur in the organization. The criteria to figure out a suitable set of metrics however need to be pre-set intelligently to avoid complications in later stages.One can also take the help of a Balanced Scorecard Toolkit that can quicken up the process.

To end it all, one gathers that the BSC thought can prove to be really useful in generating heavy revenues as by arming oneself with potent group of indicators, accountability can be established in clear and straight terms. Such reporting ways are helpful in developing a transparent culture that in turn draws trust and interest from all stakeholder groups.