Call Center Metrics - How do You Measure Them?

If your company sells any sort of product, chances are you have a support team or call center to deal with customers. Some companies outsource to countries like India where labor can be hired for lower costs. Others keep their support team close by and within the same country. Regardless of the structure or location of your call center one thing always stands true. How do you manage and measure incoming call volume, problems resolved, types of issues, etc? It’s important to gather and analyze call center metrics to answer these questions.

Some call center products are bundled with these tools but most are weak or non-existent. This is where a dedicated solution that provides things like individual customer scorecards, detailed support metrics, and other key metrics that give managers needed insight into their call center team. As we learn more about these requirements and business needs, we start to notice companies like call-center-metrics.com pop up to fulfill these business needs.

Being a call center manager, it’s very important to understand overall customer service efficiency so you can improve your internal operations as well as reward your employees based on their performance. Say, for example one of your call center employees does a great job and you’re unaware of this deed. A post call survey for the customer would be able to provide an opportunity to give this feedback, hence later rewarding the employee.

All things set aside, call center metrics are very important and a necessity in all businesses. If you don’t have anything currently in place, I recommend checking out these trial versions and seeing for yourself. I personally haven’t used them yet but based on what I’ve read thus far, they could be a great solution for you.

If you have any other suggestions or comments about general call center metrics and how you currently measure them, please let us know!

8 Comments Already

Software Vendor Said,

July 31st, 2008 @10:28 pm

Call center metrics are critical for gathering actionable data that can be broken down to a granularity that enables decision makers to work on issues such as executive work load, success rate, issue resolution time, and all factors that affect call quality as well as the costs incurred.

In the absence of accurate call center metrics, a shift of premise to a location that offers cheap labor will not solve the problem of customer support at a low cost.

Carrie T Said,

August 5th, 2008 @10:44 am

These look like some great tools to use. To add to these I would recommend a customer service book that I have been reading. It has helped me to see where I need to strengthen customer service within my own business. Thanks for the info!

Joao Said,

September 19th, 2008 @1:58 pm

As far as customer service and call centers go, I find one thing that consistently bothers people is the telemarketers pause caused by predictive dialers. A power dialer such as the one provided by Insidesales.com may be a better option if that is one thing you are trying to avoid.

markantill Said,

December 19th, 2008 @3:51 pm

The most accurate call reporting system would have to tie in to your switch in order to track call start/end. Seems this was a big thing in the late 90’s but I have seen more and more companies tracking by notes and the like. It’s simple but effective.

Remember: GIGO!

Mark

Ben Said,

December 28th, 2008 @6:31 pm

Being in the business myself I’ve heard a terrifying number of horror stories from associates about money their companies have spent on “quick fixes” – something I avoided by going with http://www.EnterpriseWizard.com, and something that people really need to be careful about. Some cheap fixes end up really expensive, and some “quick” fixes end up requiring a fix that takes eons.