Call Center Performance Management: Best Practices

Call centers seek to challenge their practices, to employ new methods to get a comprehensive view of the performance metrics.

Call Centers, or customer services receiving and transmitting multiple requests by telephone, were introduced as offshoots of telecommunications providing streamlined service for consumers of large companies with extensive customer support needs.

Normally, a call center is able to handle a considerable volume of calls at the same time, i.e. to screen calls and forward them to skilled support staff, where most issues can be resolved. Organizations starting from mail-order catalog companies and telemarketing companies to computer product help desks use call centers.

Typically, there are two types of calls: inbound and outbound.

That's where the problem of management performance is acute.

Download Whitepaper: Balanced Scorecard Design ToolkitBenchmarking, typically associated with strategic management, presupposes evaluation of business processes in relation to best practice and helps to develop plans with the aim of increasing performance levels. At large benchmarking reforms all the levels of the company from the state of mind of the employees to that of top managers, penetrating into the whole hierarchical organization of the organization.

The most conspicuous performance measures include:

and others.

A variety of different technologies enables companies to measure and monitor the performance of the workers. The Balanced scorecard, introduced by R.S. Kaplan and D. Norton in 1992, is a concept for measuring a company's activities to make managers focus on the important performance metrics that lead to success. It's not only financial outcomes that are in focus, but the human issues that drive those outcomes. Thus, it is said to balance the financial perspective with customer, process and employee perspectives. Since the time of the original concept the scorecard metrics have been revisited by Kaplan & Norton with regard to more than a decade's experience.

Typically the following processes are on the move when the scorecard is implemented:

To improve the performance of call centers one should know what metrics are best qualified. The right metrics should be performed on a call center to fulfill the scorecard.

The hallmark of a good call center is the staff's call management skills and that means interactive training can help achieve excellence at different levels for the agents, supervisors and managers. It is essential for managers to know how to recruit and train the staff to reach the strategic goals of the company, to manage the key metrics and consequently improve performance.

Different programs are designed to deliver training to call center teams. They might include

As keeping customers satisfied is a primary concern of any call center training courses feature quality programs which enhance the performance with respect to one of the most urgent demands training skilful professionals. It means they employ different training methods to evaluate current training processes and measure and improve training effectiveness. Fertile training leads to reinforcing the appropriate skills for performance improvement and achieving higher levels of customer loyalty.