newsprompt.coVOICE AND DATA INTEGRATION
A call centre or call center is a centralised office used for receiving or transmitting a large volume of requests by telephone. An inbound call centre is operated by a company to administer incoming product support or information enquiries from consumers. Outbound call centres are operated for telemarketing, solicitation of charitable or political donations, debt collection and market research. A contact centre is a location for centralised handling of individual communications, including letters, faxes, live support software, social media, instant message, and e-mail.
A call centre has an open workspace for call centre agents, with work stations that include a computer for each agent, a telephone set/headset connected to a telecom switch, and one or more supervisor stations. It can be independently operated or networked with additional centres, often linked to a corporate computer network, including mainframes, microcomputers and LANs. Increasingly, the voice and data pathways into the centre are linked through a set of new technologies called computer telephony integration.
The contact centre is a central point from which all customer contacts are managed. Through contact centres, valuable information about company are routed to appropriate people, contacts to be tracked and data to be gathered. It is generally a part of company’s customer relationship management. The majority of large companies use contact centres as a means of managing their customer interaction. These centres can be operated by either an in house department responsible or outsourcing customer interaction to a third party agency (known as Outsourcing Call Centres).
Technology
Call centre technologies include speech recognition software to allow computers to handle first level of customer support, text mining and natural language processing to allow better customer handling, agent training by automatic mining of best practices from past interactions, support automation and many other technologies to improve agent productivity and customer satisfaction. Automatic lead selection or lead steering is also intended to improve efficiencies, both for inbound and outbound campaigns. This allows inbound calls to be directly routed to the appropriate agent for the task, whilst minimising wait times and long lists of irrelevant options for people calling in. For outbound calls, lead selection allows management to designate what type of leads go to which agent based on factors including skill, socioeconomic factors and past performance and percentage likelihood of closing a sale per lead.
Businesses often have an array of standalone systems to manage customer-related activities and transactional customer data from marketing, sales, customer service and other business applications. This makes it difficult for companies to develop a single view of the customer.
The universal queue standardises the processing of communications across multiple technologies such as fax, phone, and email. The virtual queue provides callers with an alternative to waiting on hold when no agents are available to handle inbound call demand.
Services
Contact centres run support or help desks, which regularly answers technical questions from customers and assists them using their equipment or software. Support desks are used by companies in the computing, telecommunications and consumer electronics industries.
Customer service contact centres answer specific queries relating to customer issues, in the banking and utility sectors these are frequently used to answer customer questions relating to their account or payments, this type of service may even be used to respond to customer complaints and undertake retention strategies for unsatisfied customers.
Contact centres also carry out sales and marketing activities; these can be performed through cold calling strategies and increasingly through live chat applications on company websites.
Metrics
Some vital call centre performance metrics are listed below:
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Customer Satisfaction: a measure of how products and services supplied by a company meet or surpass customer expectation. C-SAT is based on customer’s experience with the support or service. The scoring for this answer is most often based on a 0 to 10 scale.
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Average Handling time (also Average Hold Time): a key measure for any contact centre planning system, as it indicates how long a new item of work takes to be handled and not just the talk time.
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Revenue Per Call: usually used in sales projects which calculates the effort of a representative with respect to increasing sales. RPC can be calculated by dividing the total amount of sale by total number of calls.
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First Call Resolution: properly addressing the customer’s need the first time they call, thereby eliminating the need for the customer to follow up with a second call.
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Total Problem Resolution: percentage of time the problem has been completely resolved from the customer point of view. This KPI is mostly used for: Operational Excellence. This keeps troubleshooting time to a minimum, which, according to industry averages, currently accounts for as much as 80 percent of total problem resolution time, and gets the problem fixed.
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Net Promoter Score: measures the loyalty that exists between a provider and a consumer. NPS is based on a direct question: How likely is it that you would recommend our company/product/service to a friend or colleague? The scoring for this answer is most often based on a 0 to 10 scale.
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Quality Scores: by far the most common metric used. It provides the ability to look at the overall caller experience and the conversations that agents are using on their phone calls.
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Service Level Agreement: an agreement between two or more parties where one is the customer and the others are service providers. The contract may involve financial penalties and the right to terminate the contract if the SLA metrics are consistently missed.
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Active & Waiting Calls: measures current volume of active calls compared to the number of callers waiting to be patched through to an agent. This is a real-time status metric that should be shared with all the agents to offer them insight on their performance. Agents should be encouraged to resolve calls on a timely basis in order to get to the next caller in queue and not keep the callers on wait.
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Call Abandonment: measures the number of calls that are disconnected before they can be connected to one of your agents. This metric is closely related to Service Level and Customer Satisfaction. Customers are not expected to be patient. They will hang up and possibly switch their brand loyalties.
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Forecast Accuracy: better described as forecasted contact load vs actual contact load. It is a performance metric that reflects the percent variance between the number of inbound customer contacts forecasted for a particular time period and the number of said contacts actually received by the centre during that time period.
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Staff Turnover/Retention: The best way to measure the satisfaction of your workforce is to look at the percentage of staff that leaves. There can be some telling information in these numbers and it is crucial to track and analyse the turnover rates in many ways.
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Up-Sell/ Cross-Sell Rate: simply the success rate of generating revenue above the original intention of the call. It is becoming an increasingly common practice, not just for pure revenue-generating call centres but for customer service centres as well.
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Staff Shrinkage: the percentage of time that employees are not available to handle calls. It is classified as non-productive time, and is made up of meeting and training time, breaks, paid time off, off-phone work, and general unexplained time where agents are not available to handle customer interactions.
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Blockage: a measure of accessibility that indicates what percentage of customers will not be able to get in touch with the contact centre at a given time due to insufficient network facilities.
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Cost Per Call: A major factor determining revenue is the cost of running the organisation. A common measure of operational efficiency is cost incurred for each minute of handling the call workload, commonly referred to as Cost per Call. This cost per call can be simply a labour cost per call, or it can be a fully loaded rate that includes payroll in addition to telecommunications, facilities, and other services costs.
