In this post, we’ll try to understand the importance of call center metrics and why every one in your team needs to do their share to meet these metrics. Like any other business, your call center management woos accounts by making commitments to clients. Once the client agrees to get your inbound or outbound call center services, then your management is bound under contract to deliver these call center metrics they have committed. Failure to deliver would result in your call center being penalized or the account pulling out. To be blunt about it, getting penalized would mean no more bonuses; pulling out would mean no more job. Imagine coming to work and then finding the portal had been shut down and you suddenly find yourself either floating or out of a job. This has happened. Bottom line, management expects every one down the line to do their part to ensure call center metrics are met. This is why your sup often goes ballistic whenever your team is falling behind and management calls your sup to a closed door meeting and gets chewed up. Poor sup. With this in mind, let’s go ahead and look at some key call center metrics and understand why these call center metrics matter a lot.
Key Call Center Metrics
First Call Resolution (FCR)
The ability to provide a satisfactory solution to a customer’s concern within the first call almost always results into a positive customer experience. This is why FCR is usually considered the most important of all call center metrics. This is where all your training, your experience and your tools are put to good use. By being knowledgeable with the customer’s issue and efficient with asking the right questions and using the right tools, you should be able to provide the best solution for your customer within the shortest amount of time. And your customer will definitely appreciate you for your competency and expertise by giving you a positive feedback. It is important to ask if the customer feels you were able to resolve the concern COMPLETELY and SATISFACTORILY on this particular call. This is how you can gauge if you indeed provided First Call Resolution from the customer’s perspective. NEVER END THE CALL WITHOUT ASKING THIS ALL IMPORTANT QUESTION. On the flipside, you can go ahead and sweet talk the customer or tell the customer a bunch of BS but if you were not able to resolve the main reason why the customer called, most probably you’d still have a very dissatisfied customer who will definitely call back and will most likely wish to speak right away with a supervisor. If you feel you are unable to help the customer at your level, don’t waste your customer’s time beating around the bush. Politely inform your customer that you may need to transfer her call to another support level that will be in a better position to assist her. Use positive scripting. Set customer’s expectation how long it may take to transfer the call to the next level. It may still be possible to resolve the issue on the same call but the transfer and additional hold time will definitely impact the customer experience and it will be up to the next support level to still try and get a good feedback from the customer.Service Level and Abandon Rate
These two call center metrics are inversely proportional. Service Level is the percentage of calls answered within a pre-determined number of seconds. Abandon Rate, on the other hand, are the number of customers that hang up or abandon their calls before being connected with a call center agent. From their definitions, it is plain to see that the more calls that get answered quickly, the fewer customers will hang up or abandon their calls and the lesser the frustration. Although shorter handle times can greatly improve a site’s Service Level, the quality of the call should never be compromised for the sake of lowering AHT. Besides, agents cannot really control how long each call will take. Besides AHT, Service Level and Abandon Rate are affected by other call center metrics such as Schedule Adherence and Workforce Forecast Accuracy. Obviously any absences, tardiness and other non-adherence infractions create unexpected understaffing that will adversely affect Service Level. Any call center who cannot consistently meet the Service Level they have committed to runs the risk of being penalized or losing the account. This is why your sup gets hypertensive every time you call in sick or tardy and will do everything she can to get you to come to work.Customer Satisfaction
This call center metric goes by different terminologies. Whether it’s Net Promoter Survey (NPS), Willingness To Recommend (WTR), Voice of the Customer (VOC) or any other derivative, Customer Satisfaction simply grades via a post-call survey how well the call center agent handled the customer’s concern from the customer’s perspective. Recognizing the fact that a large percentage of customers will never recommend or willingly do business again with companies that delivered bad customer experience, clients have traditionally equated customer satisfaction with customer loyalty and profitability. Clients seriously value these surveys and customer verbatim to find opportunities for improvement. Competing call centers will always try to be the top site just so they would have a better chance of keeping the account. Call centers that are consistently among bottom performers most likely will not have their contract renewed. It’s simply business. Clients will always go with call centers that can deliver the most bang for the least buck and if your call center cannot deliver the metrics you committed then they may have to let you go. Remember this whenever you’re on the phone with a customer.Schedule Adherence
This call center metric simply means the percentage of time within a shift an agent is logged in doing what she’s supposed to be doing. This includes time interacting with customers, making approved outbound calls and any after call work. While scheduled lunch and breaks are not counted against Schedule Adherence, any amount of time beyond the allotted time for lunch and breaks constitute an infraction. Work Force Management plots out the number of agents available at regular intervals depending on the anticipated queue or volume of calls per interval so as to meet the Service Level the center had committed to. Whenever agents do not follow or adhere to their plotted break schedules, if they go on over breaks or if they’re logged out when they’re supposed to be logged in, this is when your MCs go berserk and start shouting out names, calling your sup or even posting your names up on the monitor for the whole floor to see. It is easy to see how Service Level and Abandon Rate can be adversely affected by non-adherence. Your MCs have worked hard on their spreadsheets plotting your schedules so please be nice to them and just stick to your sked!Forecast Accuracy
This crucial call center metric determines how good or bad the queue will be tonight. Ideally, Work Force Management prefers to have just the right amount of agents on the floor per interval to ensure Service Level will be as what management committed and that the queue will be manageable. WFM does a balancing act to ensure there is no understaffing or overstaffing per interval. Understaffing ruins your center’s Service Level and puts tremendous stress on every one. Overstaffing, on the other hand, ruins your center’s profitability. There needs to be this perfect balance. The problem is WFM made this forecast on the assumption that every one will report for work and when agents call in sick or tardy, this perfect balance goes haywire. So the next time the queue goes through the roof, we actually only have ourselves to blame.There are several other call center metrics out there but let’s just focus on these five in the meantime. Tenured agents most probably will say they know these already and yup maybe they do. Again, the purpose of this article is to make you understand how important it is for everyone to do their part in ensuring that your call center lives up to the metrics management committed to and keep both customers and clients happy.
Have a wonderful shift!
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