Customer Call Center

Customer Call Center

Customer call centers require a strong management team to assist in the decision making process involving control measures. There are different types of control measures to see how efficient and effective an employee is within the company. There are measures for employees and measurements for the call center as a whole. It is important to understand how each of these is separate yet connected to each other.

Measuring Employees

Organizational performance is the aggregation of all outputs of the organization’s services or products. One key to measuring parameters is organizational productivity, which is the selling prices of the services divided by the cost incurred to produce those services. The second key to measuring parameters is organizational effectiveness, which is the extent to which the organizational objectives are appropriate and the level of achieving those objectives. In order to measure the organizational performance, a set of tools should be used to enable monitoring and evaluating such performance.

Reaching the Call Center

Accessibility to a call center is the first step to customer satisfaction. When a call center does not have a goal for accessibility, it will have a negative effect on the call center's effectiveness and customer satisfaction. The call center should strive to meet the goal of no more than 2% of callers who will need to call back because of a busy signal. If there is a higher percentage on a consistent basis in a month's time, the telephone lines need to be evaluated, and more lines added if it is determined that there is an insufficient number of lines available.

Staffing is another possible solution to this problem. Management needs to evaluate the number of staff on duty. If the call center is understaffed, this issue needs to be evaluated as well. The reason may be employee absenteeism, or a scheduling issue, and must be determined in order to plan the next step of evaluation and resolution.

Reaching an Agent

Another performance measure used is the time it takes and agent to answer a call. A wait threshold is to be stated and may vary due to the day and time. The current goal has been set to 80% of calls answered in 3 to 5 minutes during peak times and immediately during non-peak times. The goal can be altered after reviewing on a quarterly basis. It is important to remember it will be directly affected by schedule adherence, and, therefore, the agents must be held accountable for attendance.

Resolving the Issue

The main issue for the resolution of a call is the knowledge of the agent. In order for each call to be handled effectively, each agent will undergo ongoing training in sales, history of the company, basic technical issues, and will be knowledgeable in