What are your chances to provide the best customer experience without having a formal call center strategy? If your answer to this question is less than optimal, you’re not alone. There are no statistics on how many businesses fail without a certain strategy. At the same time, when you do not attribute concrete benefits to them, the importance of documenting call center processes disappears over time.
It would be wrong to say that 70% of companies without a defined call center strategy fail. But instead, it outlines the different aspects of streamlining a call center and fire department when departments are underperforming. With a dedicated and documented call center strategy, you avoid dealing with existing strategic shortcomings at that moment.
Metrics to add to Call Center Strategy
Your call center is the first line of response to enable almost any customer interaction. That’s why it’s so important for your team to retain the customer. You need to see this as the first step in the strategy you have. You can include the following in your customer service metrics. These:
• Average standby time
• Abandonment rate
• First, call resolution (FCR)
• Service Level Agreement (SLA)
• Average Transit Time (AHT)
• Average Engagement
• Solution Time
• Resolution Ratio
• Post-Call Uptime
• Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
• Net Recommendation Score (NPS)
• Customer Effort Score (CES)
• Customer Retention
• Expansion Revenue
At the same time, do not forget about your representatives in the call center! Call centers are located to serve your customers. In addition, the biggest asset in call centers is the workforce you have, which also helps your customers. This being is human. In short, the success of your call center is the success of your team. The structure is a key element here. You can think of inspectors, quality assurance managers, and talented employees in key areas. There are also several ways to configure a call center. Each has its wounds and paths to success.
How is the Call Center configured?
The starting point of a call center strategy should start with your employees. Although hierarchy is not a popular term, you can easily create the backbone of any call center with a defined structure.
What are Call Center Roles?
A call center has basic roles. So, what are these roles?
• Call center representative
• Team leader
• Call center manager
• Vice president of customer service
• Call center director
• Data analyst
• KG analyst
• Workforce management
• Operations Officer
• People
• Team coach
• IT – Telecom specialist
All of these roles come to you with different roles. For example, the terms analyst and manager translate to Quality Assurance Manager. In other cases, quality assurance tasks are defined for senior agents. As staff progress in their careers, their development becomes critical to the success of call centers. You should also make sure that you include individual career progression following your call center strategy.
Good Training Impacts Call Center Performance
The development of a call center will always need some form of training. For call center training to be successful for your call center strategy, you first need to explain why you need training. Your education can be formal, informal, accredited, or in-house. It often comes across as a mixture of these. Whichever of these options you prefer, be sure to include the 6 items below.
- In-depth dive into the company’s products
You must give the agents enough time to get to know the products you have sold and served. This is not only necessary for someone who knows the product language to deal with the customer. It is also an important step for the representative to deliver with confidence. If a representative is shy away from technical conversations or has never seen the product you’re selling, they have no authority. In this case, it also loses the trust of the customer. - Best practices for call control
As with product training, call control training has a very important place for any customer service representative. Even experienced agents should receive training on your inbound call center solution. Also, training on a single solution isn’t all-inclusive. Call center technology is also constantly evolving.
Be sure to know that every customer representative is regularly aware of the best call control practices. Otherwise, you run the risk of transferring a customer to the wrong team or cutting the line altogether. - Listening to call logs
Call recordings are included in all good call center platforms. It is often also a technology that is taken for granted. This is one of the best ways to measure where employees need training. Customers also need to listen to the real opinions that are made. Note also the following:
• Excessive silence and constant “mmm” means
• Trying to fill in the blanks for things you don’t know the solution for
• Putting the customer on hold to look for documents
• Giving customers the wrong answers
• Repeatedly asking for customer information
When you see an area at the point of improvement, you should document it in the personal development plan. With this plan, the ongoing development of your employees and call center is very important. It should include all the customer service skills you’ve identified at this point. You may also need to have a skill matrix to track all of this. - Live to view
If you identify a person who has the same problems in a call, you can listen to these calls in real-time. It is also possible to offer guidance to the representatives to correct something they said during the interview. Or you can give advice when they’re stuck on what to say. In these scenarios, things can also get out of control. At this point, you can inherit the call from your agent. In this way, you will prevent the problem from becoming an increasing problem and turning into a bigger problem. - Official upgrade procedure
You can’t track every call that has you in real-time. For this reason, official upgrade processes must be documented and updated for agents to monitor. In the event of an escalation, it takes a lot of care for your representatives to calm down the process to the customer and communicate it to the right person. In different cases, different staff members may also be referred to. For example, only the account team can resolve a billing issue. Even for a technical problem, referrals can be made to people who have received special product training. At this point, take care to make the process of your agents as easy as possible. Here’s what you can do:
• Understand when the search should be upgraded
• Find the best person to manage the call
• Explain to customers what happens next
• Transfer the call
• Save notes that fit your CRM - Latest news
An important part of a smooth upgrade procedure is keeping documents up to date. In any of the examples above, it’s important to ensure that agents are confident in the information they provide to customers. At this point, relieving a caller’s anxiety and having them transferred to the wrong team can have adverse effects.
You can also assign responsibility for the relevant documents to one escalator per department. You can also have meetings with team members every month to refresh documents and routing. You can keep a log that includes the date you made the change and the details of the change. This will help your agents track changes and match your messages as well.
What are the Call Center Metrics to Monitor?
As we have mentioned before, call center metrics are a valuable resource that must be consulted when evaluating call center performance. These are just a few of the KPIs you can consider tracking for your organization, business, and company.
Operational Metrics
- Cost Per Call
Cost per call gives you information by measuring the cost of processing a single phone call. To calculate the cost per call, you should add up all the costs you have of running your call center within a certain period, including employee wages, benefits, and software licenses. You can then divide this number by the number of calls answered in the same period. - Call Arrival Speed
This KPI measures the average number of calls received by the call center over a period. It generally detects calls per minute or calls per hour. To determine your call arrival rate, you can divide the total number of calls your center has received in a day by the amount of time you want. - Total Number of Calls Made
As the name suggests, this metric finds the total number of calls your call center has answered in a day. In this case, if the representative answered the phone and gave an opinion to the customer, they will be considered hired. There are no fancy equations here. To calculate your total searches considered, you only need to count these searches. - Percentage of Blocked Calls
The percentage of blocked calls indicates how many customers are signaled as busy when communicating with your call center. Remember that the main goal here is to maintain this percentage as minimal as possible. Multiply the number of calls that do not respond to agents by 100 after dividing them by the total number of incoming calls. This will calculate the percentage of blocked calls. - Initial Response Time (FRT)
This KPI measures the time between the first time a customer sends an inquiry and the call center representative contacts them for a response. If your call center has some type of call system, your initial response time should be 24 hours or less. For telephone queries, the initial response time should only be a few minutes. - First Call Solution (FCR)
FCR, the most well-known call center metric, helps a call center resolve a customer issue or complaint without the need for follow-up when they first call. FCR is a process that is calculated from the total number of first searches with the total number of calls solved in the first attempt.
It’s also important to note that FCR criteria change from one call center to another. For example, a call center considers a call in which a colleague joins the conference as a high-level call. But others may not think that way about this conference. To accurately read the call center’s FCR, you first need to decide how your organization is also defining this useful metric. - Recall Rate
Your repeat rates determine the number of searches to address the same topic or topic. This call center metric is a closely related use of FCR. If you want to calculate your repeat search rate, you can add up the total number of searches related to a particular issue and divide it by the number of calls. - Attrition Rate
Your attrition rates help measure the agent turnover rate you have, in short, the number of employees lost over a period. To calculate your wear rates, you need to multiply your total wear count by 100 by dividing it by the average number of vehicles.
Search Time Metrics
- Average Response Rate (ASA)
This metric reflects how long it takes for agents to answer the call after being routed to the call center. To calculate the ASA, divide the total customer wait time by the number of calls answered. Then multiply by 100. - Average Processing Time (AHT)
AWT and AHT should not be confused with each other. AHT is the measurement of the average time it takes for an agent to complete a customer interaction call. If you want to determine the AHT of your call center, take the sum of your total call, hold, and follow-up times and divide it by the total number of calls answered. - Call Abandonment Rate
The call drop rate is applied to indicate the percentage of customers who hang up the phone before connecting to a representative. If you want to calculate your call, and drop rates, divide the total number of abandoned calls by the total number of incoming calls. Then you need to multiply it by 100.
Customer Satisfaction Metrics
- Customer Effort Score (CES)
CES refers to the amount of effort required to solve a customer’s problem, answer their questions, and fulfill a request. If you want to determine the CES for your call center, you must first learn from customers about their experience. For this, you can prepare a 7-point scale that varies between very difficult and very easy. So, you can see the results better by doing a survey. - Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
This KPI, which is generally used with CES, shows the overall customer satisfaction with the service of the call center. Like CES, CSAT usage can evaluate customers’ experiences on a seven-point scale that ranges from “not satisfying” to “very satisfying.” Ideally, your CSAT score should be between 75% and 85%. However, these percentages may vary depending on the sector. If you want to see the comparisons by sector, you can look at the customer satisfaction indices for this. - Customer Departure Rate
Customer departure rate refers to the percentage of customers who stop services within a certain period. The high customer churn rate is also a result of poor customer satisfaction. It requires a re-evaluation of existing call center applications. To calculate your loss rates, you must subtract the total number of users at the end of the period from the total number of users at the beginning of the period. When you get that total, divide it by the total number of users per period, and then multiply by 100. - Net referral Score (NPS)
NPS is a popular use of KPIs to assess overall customer experience, customer loyalty, and business growth potential. Businesses can conduct NPS surveys. For this, they can perform the use of a scale from 0 to 10. Not at all likely, and 10 is extremely likely. Those who give a score of 9 or 10 are usually introducers. Those who give 7 and 8 points are considered passive. Those between 0 and 6 points are the ones who denigrate the brand.
