Measure & Control Call Center Performance

To measure and control call center performance, you will need to gauge the rate at which it is performing. These measures can show you how.

Simple call centers evolving into multi-channel contact centers do not just happen in a whiff. Adding or upgrading technologies and expanding staff skills are important following the addition of new applications such as e-mail and web chat. Also, it is necessary to determine which performance measurements should be used for this new kind of operation.

Performance measures that are associated with service are said to be the most important. These measures may work for both call and contact centers or change depending on the type of transaction.

An example of call center performance measure is blockage. This accessibility measure indicates the rate of customers at which they cannot access the center at a specific time due to inadequate network facilities. Measures that indicate blockage or busy signals by occurrences of “busy trunk lines” are utilized by most call centers. Failure of a blockage goal enables a center to meet its rate of answer goal by blocking excess calls. It may appear as if the call center is doing a good job at managing call queues, but it can actually have a negative impact on customer accessibility.

The call center should also carefully know how much facilities are needed for email server capacity and bandwidth to avoid huge quantities of emails from overloading the system. The same goes for the number of lines that support fax services, which must be adequate enough to allow reasonable blockage.

Another way to measure call center performance is through abandon rate. Call centers usually gauge the number and rate of abandons because both correlate in terms of revenues and retention. However, it has to be noted that the abandon rate is not completely under the control of the call center. While the average waiting time in queue can affect abandons, there are a lot of other factors affecting this number, among which include availability of service alternatives, time of day, caller tolerance and many others. Also, while the abandon rate measure is not commonly related with email interactions, it applies, however, to web chat communications.

Self-service availability and utilization is also an important accessibility measure and is commonly gauged by self-service menu points and methodology, demographic group or time of day.

On the other hand, the most common measure for speed of answer in a call center is the service level. Meanwhile, the longest delay in queue (LDQ) is another gauge for speed of answer, which is used to indicate when it is necessary for immediate staffing reactions. LDQ is categorized into two namely longest delay to answer and longest delay to abandon. The former is the delay for a customer’s transaction to be finally handled by the agent and the latter is delay for a customer to abandon the contact.

These measures usually gauge the speed of call center performance. There are still many other performance measures applicable to call centers, both in-bound and multi-channel. These may be used to measure individual agent performance or overall call center operations. In all cases, these measures should be used to determine performance excellence as well as gaps that need improvement with different adjustments.