Metrics For Proper and Good Call Center Operation

The high cost of labor in western countries has pushed many companies in the United States and Europe to outsource many of their processes in countries that offer cheaper labor costs. Though majority of these jobs are in manufacturing and production, other business processes like customer service, order taking, marketing and back office processes have also been outsourced to call centers in countries like India and the Philippines.

The boom in the call center industry has helped in the economy of many countries in Asia. Since back office work, sales, customer service and technical support requires a lot of man power, these call centers employee thousands of people for their operations. With these much people working, certain metrics need to be met in order to comply with the western standards of good service. These metrics differ depending on the type of service being provided by a company but there are similarities in all of them in some of the criterions. The call center quality monitoring metrics standard in any services in most call centers are attendance, call quality, average handling time and customer feedback.

Since there are a lot of employees working in a call center, making sure they are present for work is very important for successful operation. Absences can jeopardize proper flow of calls in the call center and can put burden to employees present and doing their job. Aside from making sure that employees are physically present in the workplace, it is important to make sure that they are in their stations making or taking calls. There are systems that can now be used to ensure this by monitoring their phones and can even be done remotely by clients overseas.

Call quality is very important and can be measured differently depending on the type of service in the call center. Most of the time call quality can be distinguished by listening in to the calls between the agent and the customer. A proper flow of the call needs to be established and any questions need to be addressed and resolved as much as possible. Trainers or supervisors in the call center grade the agents based on criterions established by the company.

Another metric that companies put a big weight on is the average handling time (AHT). This is the average time an agent spend the calls. Ideally, companies would want an agent to have a short handling time so they can accept or make more calls to or from customers. The established AHT depends on the type of service being provided by the call center. Generally, technical support accounts require longer average handling time compared to other services like customer service or sales.

The last and probably most important of the metrics is customer feedback. The customers are very important for any business and keeping them happy should always be the priority of any call centers. Giving them resolutions on their problems, giving them good service, answering their queries and politely providing them information should be in the mind of every agents. Each company have their own means to contact customers and ask them their satisfaction level with the agent that attended to their calls.

These are the metrics that most of the call centers adhere to. They are standard and have been set for good operation in the call center.