By Malcolm Carlaw

By Joan Henshaw

Stop Knee-Jerk Reacting to Trends That Aren’t Real!

So your sales are down a bit from last week. Or maybe it’s your profit or new leads that are down, or your expenses have popped up a bit. You’re probably ready to rampage in search of the source of the problem, or at least mope around for a few days. But if you indulge your reflex reaction, you’ll be wasting your time and energy.

Just because this week’s numbers – or this month’s or this quarter’s – are different from last, doesn’t mean there’s really a difference. Even though the numbers might be down, it doesn’t mean the trend is going down too.

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We, here in this article will talk about how a simple inbound call center evolves into a multi dimensional outsourcing service provider and so does its performance management problem as well. With advanced technology and brightest minds, call centers expand and upgrade themselves to the next level of services and quality.

But we need to understand that as call centers, their services and outsourcing trend have changed; their performance management techniques need to be changed as well. To determine the standards and quality of working, we are presenting 18 performance measures in terms of services, quality of work, efficiency and profitability of their services and impact of their support on a business and its growth.

We are analyzing these mentioned performance measures in two aspects of work levels: one for ordinary call center and another contact for multi level support provider contact center.

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The most important measures of performance are those associated with service. Some of these measures are the same for both a call center and contact center, while some will need to change slightly to reflect the new types of transactions.

1. Blocks and Hurdles

Blocks and hurdles are indicated as time when customers are not able to get through the network due to insufficient facilities at work. The busy signal, dropped calls and other situations can be count as such. These obstruct the speed of performance and have adverse affect on quality of services. Also, it has negative effect on customer satisfaction.

Solution: Increase the server capacity. To estimate how many network facilities to be needed by you so that it does not get overloaded.

2. Abandon Ratio

The dropped calls do impact the retention and revenue generation of call centers. They understand that making your customer wait in queue to receive a call is not going to take you anywhere. Nonetheless, it cannot be eliminated properly. There are number of factors that affect this factor such as caller’s patience, the time of call and other alternatives of getting in touch like email or dropping a number to call back.

3. Self-Service

Now, when market is expanding and customer base of organizations are growing, their partner call centers are adopting new measures to attend them. Most of them are adapting self-service facilities that help customers to choose their operations and help menu by themselves.
In a contact center, the performance can be tracked by observing how many times help menu was accessed and how many times a live agent was called upon?

4. Service Level

Service level consists of determining the most average speed of processing a request. Some of Call Center Outsourcing Services and contact centers measure the response time taken by the customers as well.

5. Maximum Delay in Queue

Another measure of speed is to calculate the longest time a customer was made to wait. This is also referred as worst case.

Quality Measures

6. First Resolution Rate

The first call resolution is called one and done in call centers which is very critical and significant for the performance levels of a Outsourced Call Center. The factors contributing in this performance measure are the team that handled the query, time of call and nature of query.

7. Rate of Transfer

The seamless nature of a process of a call center can be determined by the rate of transfer. How much part of the work was handled over or transferred to another team or person, also counts.

8. Communications Skills

How well versed customer support executives are and how they behave with customer can either bog down your reputation or soar it above the clouds. This quality measure can be monitored through observance, reviewing the performance and proper reporting channels.

10. Procedures Adherence

This helps to integrate value and customer satisfaction together. Your agents should be willing to stick to workflow and shifting of process. Also, they should feel obliged to call scripts because they are trademark of your call center and brand awareness tactic for your client.

Efficiency Performance Measures

11. Agent Occupancy

Agent occupancy is the time that an agent takes to attend the customer as compared to the times he is not taking the calls. This is an important measure to check and oversee how your agents are utilizing the working hours.

12. Staff Attrition

It is the time when your staff is not present to handle the flow of calls. It could be due to meeting times, break times or other non productive issues. It is an important measure as you can easily calculate that how many people you will need in a session so that no call would go missed.

13. Efficiency of Schedule

It is about just hitting the mark. Not less and not more, just the right number of people working for you. Understaffing or overstaffing both is extremely dangerous curves for an organization.

14. Adherence to Schedule

This performance measure is a calculation of number of working hours per schedule. It ascertains the productivity of a team and its agents.

15. System Availability

An agent is incapable of doing anything if his system is slow. The overall performance of an agent can be marred by a slow system. For instance, IVR is much used and coveted technique of every call center. It eases down the workload of agents by 50 percent, in case IVR is not functioning properly, an agent would have to devote time to understand the nature of the query and answering it accordingly.

Profitability Measures

16. Rate of Conversion

The success of call center depends on the growth of organization they work for. How many of leads have been translated into sales, is the measure of their real success and actual performance.

17. Up-Selling and Cross-Selling

How much value has you agents added to your clients. This value added services adds as an advantage along with generated revenue in the kitty of your client.

18. Costing as per one Call

This is a critical and bottom line measure to calculate the efficiency and workload stamina of a call center. How much effort, facility, money and labor you have put in one call and what you are getting back out of it can be a real eye opener shot for any call center which boasts about success.

Performance management is the driving force behind any successful call center operations.

To establish effective and best in service, Outsourced Call Center performance management system a rigorous implementation of a four dimensional program is highly recommended.

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Human resources studies and management development training focus on finding the best ways for people to reach goals and be as efficient as possible at work. In human resources studies managers learn how to stay abreast of complicated and ever-changing policies, procedures, compliance requirements, and best practices.

Managers also learn how to stay on top of everything, which involves setting up goals. One expert, for example, has even named this process SMART Goal. Each letter in the word “smart” represents the five step process of setting and achieving your goals.

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Every call center that I have worked at in the last 20 years has used employee surveys with varied success.

In this article, Thomas Legault shares his thoughts on how to incorporate the survey results for the most effective results.

1. Why conduct an employee survey?

The three main reasons to conduct an online employee survey are:

1) to identify issues that can affect your employees quality of life at work;
2) identify ways in which productivity can be increased; and
3) identity issues that can affect client satisfaction.

An employee survey that is properly designed will yield results that will help you set priorities within the different actions you can take to resolve the issues identified

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Between 2007 and 2008, in the midst of what former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan called “by far” the worst financial crisis in the U.S. history, American CEOs were not exactly destitute.

In fact, according to a survey of 2,700 public companies by independent research firm the Corporate Library, as the stock market plummeted by 37 percent and 2.6 million Americans became unemployed, median annual compensation for CEOs declined barely by a miniscule 0.08 percent. But wait, that’s not all: Three quarters of the surveyed CEOs actually received a raise, proving that executive compensation is recession-proof!

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