Understanding Call Center Metrics (Or Why Your Sup Goes Ballistic Every Time You’re Absent)

Hi there! Hope you’re having a great day today.

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!

Philippines Drops Behind Vietnam and Thailand in English Proficiency

When a great team loses through complacency, it will constantly look for new and more intricate explanations to explain away defeat.                                    -Pat Riley 

The NEWS last night that the Philippines had fallen behind Vietnam and Thailand in English Proficiency among college graduates in Asia serves as an eye opener for our country’s policy makers, especially now that the Philippine BPO industry is about to shift into Artificial Intelligence where the mode of instruction will most probably be strictly English. According to Hopkins International, which recently administered a Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC) exam for ten thousand Filipino graduating college students, the average score the Philippines got was a CEFR Level B1 which is fourth from the highest CEFR Proficiency Level of C2 and is equivalent to the English proficiency level of high school students in Vietnam and Thailand. Stated another way, our college graduates have the English proficiency level of a Vietnamese or Thai high school student.

TOEIC is an English language testing system developed by US-based Educational Testing Service (ETS) designed specifically to measure the everyday English listening, speaking and writing skills of people working or seeking to work in an international environment where English is the primary medium of instruction. There are other English Proficiency testing services like Cambridge, CEFR, IELTS and others that basically have the same purpose of testing and grading your level of English proficiency.

In sharp contrast, Switzerland-based EF EPI, another English proficiency testing service, ranked the Philippines as third in Asia behind Singapore and Malaysia and fifteenth worldwide as of 2017. You could say it all depends on who does the testing but take note that the Philippines was thirteenth worldwide in 2016. It’s not that we’re getting less proficient but more like other countries are getting much better.

This news isn’t exactly surprising as far as I’m concerned. As a supervisor, I had the privilege of training and molding as many as sixty mostly newbie call center agents over a two year period. They were an odd group of college graduates, working students and even high school graduates. On the production floor, I would regularly listen to calls as part of my monitoring and some calls would make me fall off my seat and ask myself, “How did that guy get past recruitment?” I can almost tell just by listening from the conversation that this customer will ask to speak with someone else. Often, you really cannot blame customers why they would prefer to speak with an American representative. It’s up to the sup to intervene and try to save the call or risk getting a DSAT. English proficiency isn’t just the ability to speak but more importantly the ability to comprehend what the other person is saying and responding appropriately.

Will Vietnam or Thailand become the next best destination for BPOs now that they have overtaken the Philippines in terms of English proficiency? I’m no economist so I’m not even going to guess which country can offer lower wages and easier to do business with. I do know that other than being proficient in English, a neutral accent also plays an important function when communicating with English-speaking customers. Perhaps Filipino call center agents have an advantage as far as neutral accent is concerned but I could be wrong. I have seen Thai celebrity Aerin Yuktadatta on History Channel’s Celebrity Car Wars and if most Thais can speak English as good as Aerin does, then we’re in trouble! And don’t forget Vietnam was a French colony and damn what an advantage Vietnam would have if they could speak both English and French proficiently! Suddenly we’re not feeling so cocky anymore, eh?

Aerin Yuktadatta

This should serve as a wake up call for every one who has a stake in the Philippine call center industry. Obviously we cannot sit on our laurels and be complacent anymore. This did not happen overnight. Vietnam and Thailand have long been working hard to be more proficient with their English skills and finally have overtaken us. On top of this, we also have the rise of Artificial Intelligence to cope with. Other than remittances from our OFWs, call centers and BPOs remain to be among the Philippines’ top revenue centers adding 25-Billion much needed dollars to our economy in 2017. With the recent economic changes being implemented in the Middle East that could adversely affect our OFW sector, it would be a fiscal nightmare if we also lose a big chunk of the call center industry at this critical point in our economy.

Concrete and immediate steps should be taken to recover lost ground and we should start at school where learning takes place. We never required English proficiency as a pre-requisite to enter college like Vietnam and Thailand did. Perhaps it is high time we do. Teachers should also be certified English proficient. How can a teacher teach English well if she herself is not proficient? These are small steps we can take now that can bring big benefits in the near future. On a more personal level, you yourself can test your own English proficiency and see which level you are at. There are several sites where you can take the exam for FREE. I also posted an ARTICLE earlier where you can take a FREE English proficiency exam. I encourage you to challenge yourself to take any or all of the free proficiency exams just so you would know how you can further improve your English proficiency.

About 20 years ago, India was the leading country as far as call centers are concerned. Back then, India probably did not even consider the Philippines as a threat when we first joined the call center bandwagon. After just a few years, the Philippines caught up and eventually overtook India as the leading outsourcing destination for foreign companies. Although it would probably be a long time before Vietnam or Thailand could even hope of catching up with the Philippines as a leading outsourcing destination, it would still be best to be proactive and avoid losing out in the end.

7 Powerful Effective Communication Skills for Call Center Agents

"We have two ears and one mouth so that we listen twice as much as we speak."                                          Epictetus

Nowadays, news travels fast on social media and bad news travels exponentially faster. The WORST that can happen with a dissatisfied customer is for that customer to go on social media to vent out her frustration. This is exactly what happened in a recent incident concerning a TELCO customer in the US ranting against a Filipino call center agent on Facebook, a post which went viral.  Her viral post left a sour taste in my mouth especially after realizing that the customer’s main frustration was that the call center agent did not understand the real issue and the call took over an hour. There was clearly a failure of communication where either the customer did not understand the call center agent or the call center agent did not understand the customer or they both did not understand each other. Reminds me of that KHAMAKA BREKKER video I saw on YouTube which I still find very frustrating no matter how many times I have watched it.

As call center agents, ensuring there is effective communication between customers and agents is a lot more challenging mainly because we are not face to face with the people we are speaking with. Without the benefit of being able to read their lips or interpret their body language, we still need to effectively communicate with our customers using only our ears, our tools and our focus to work with. This is why it is important that we avoid distractions and maintain our focus on every call.

In an earlier POST, I emphasized the importance of effective communication skills in providing rockstar customer service. With the recent incident that triggered the viral FB post, I felt it is important to focus a little more on the subject of effective communication skills so that call center agents can avoid a repeat of having a very frustrated customer on the other end and instead project an image of efficiency and professionalism. In this post, I have listed down 7 effective communication skills for call center agents which I know you will all find very useful:

ACTIVE LISTENING

Treat each and every call as a unique customer concern. Avoid being complacent, assuming that the resolution to your customer’s concern is the same as every other call you have received. One size does not fit all! Active listening is a powerful effective communication skill that requires you to focus and listen attentively to what your customer is saying before proposing a solution. Rushing a call and providing a generic solution is not the same as being efficient. While it may be true that you have resolved the same type of problem dozens of times every shift, there could be some unique concerns your customer mentioned that you may miss if you don’t practice active listening and provide an inaccurate solution. Nothing frustrates a customer more than feeling that you did not understand her real concern. If you feel you are having difficulty hearing or understanding what your customer is saying, do not hesitate to politely let your customer know that you are unable to hear her clearly so that she can make adjustments on her end. This gives your customer the impression that you are actively listening to what she is saying. Effective communication requires that you be good at giving and receiving information.

PARAPHRASE

This is a very powerful effective communication skill. Applied correctly, paraphrasing eliminates misinterpretation of information the customer provides. Whenever you feel you are not a hundred percent clear with what your customer just said, it would be wise to rephrase, but not repeat, what the customer said just to make sure you correctly understood her. Paraphrasing is a powerful effective communication skill that lets your customer feel that you clearly understood her real concern and should be able to provide the correct solution. Paraphrasing usually starts with something like “Just to be clear Mrs. Customer, did you mean…”or “I would like to make sure we’re on the same page Mrs. Customer, did you say that…”, then rephrase, but not repeat, what the customer said and then wait for the customer’s response. Note that I keep stressing that you do not repeat word for word like a parrot what the customer said as this tends to be irritating for the customer and makes you look incompetent. Paraphrasing requires that you rephrase in your own words how you understood what the customer said. Paraphrasing even allows the customer to correct herself after you rephrase her statement and she realizes she gave you the wrong info. Just make sure you paraphrase in a friendly tone and not sound confrontational or like you’re interrogating the customer.

ACKNOWLEDGE

Whenever you paraphrase a customer, let your customer know you understood her response clearly by acknowledging her. By saying something as simple as “Thank you!” acknowledging is another powerful effective communication skill that let’s your customer feel that you are giving her your 100 percent attention. This gives your customer the impression that you are competent and she is in good hands. Never use “uh-huh” to acknowledge your customer, especially if you say multiple uh-huhs in rapid succession. Your customer will get the impression you are either bored with the conversation or you have nothing intelligent to say.

HOLD YOUR TONGUE

This powerful effective communication skill demands a lot of discipline and self control from you. Honestly, most of us are guilty of this bad habit of interrupting our customers while they’re talking. This is mainly because as call center agents, we already have the information and experience available to us which enables us to have pre-conceived ideas what the customer’s concern is and how we can resolve the concern. Holding your tongue requires you to fight the urge to barge in while your customer is talking. Never interrupt your customer. Interruption, whether intentional or not, will always be interpreted as rudeness on your part. Make a conscious effort to hold your tongue, bite it if you have to, and let your customer finish what she needs to say before you respond. Letting your customer finish talking allows her to provide you more info that could otherwise be left out or omitted if you interrupt. Take the time to digest and note down what your customer is saying and organize your thoughts before responding. Remember to apply soft skills and choose your words wisely.

TONE

The tone of your voice, believe it or not, is also another powerful skill for effective communication. It is usually recommended that you speak in a low, calm and confident tone to project an aura of reassurance and competence on the phone. Talking calmly often calms down even an irate customer. Your tone should tell the customer that everything is fine and she should have nothing to worry about. I always tell my team even if you look like Freddy Kruger but you sound like George Clooney, in the customer’s mind you are George Clooney! That’s the magic of your tone. There will be times when you get a very irate customer on the other end and your heart starts beating at 200 beats per minute (not even sure if that’s humanly possible) at which point, and this I learned from my science class, your vocal chords contract and your voice becomes high-pitched and you start sounding like a smurf instead of George Clooney. Not good. The key here is to not let your customer affect your calm demeanor. You should be controlling your customer, not the other way around. Remain calm. Reassure your customer in a calm, low tone that you will take care of her concern. On a number of occasions, I even went as far as telling an irate customer that I would love to help her but I cannot help her unless she calms down. There can never be any effective communication until your customer calms down. Use your magical tone.

CHOOSE YOUR WORDS WELL

It’s wonderful that our brain can process information a thousand times faster than our mouth can talk. Imagine the chaos if this was the other way around. We’d be talking without thinking! In a previous POST, I discussed the importance of thinking before speaking. Choosing your words well is a powerful effective communication skill that we should apply on all our calls. Make it a habit to always ask yourself if there is a better way to say what you want to say. Make certain the words you choose are relevant to the customer’s concern and demeanor. This makes the customer feel that you are genuinely interested in her concern. But be aware that there is a fine line between choosing your words well and patronizing the customer. Your customers can smell bullshit and will not appreciate it. Be subtle.

CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT

Always make it a habit to assess how effective your communication skill was on the last call and find opportunities how you can further improve on your next calls. The day you stop improving is the day you stop growing as a professional. Strive to be better today than you were yesterday. One motivation why I started this blogsite is for me to reach out and teach my team things I never got to teach them while I was still their sup. The fact that I am currently no longer part of the call center industry and that my team have already moved on to other locations does not stop me from sharing lessons which I know can contribute to their continuous improvement. Sorry if I sounded sentimental. Those kids were like sons and daughters to me and I sorely miss them.

I had the opportunity to communicate effectively with customers who can barely speak English and even with customers who had to communicate through interpreters. A call center agent’s work is definitely challenging but as long as you have the necessary effective communication skills and adapt these powerful skills to conform to the customer’s unique concern and demeanor, then you should be able to resolve the concern efficiently and customer ends the call on a happy note.