Call Center New Year Resolutions

With the new year comes new year's resolutions. Every year some of us resolve to stop smoking, lose weight or be a better person. Sorry I cannot help you with the first two. If you manage a call center one way you can be a better person is to review and change your metrics, thresholds and reports.

Reviewing and changing your metrics, thresholds and reports will make you a better person because your agents and supervisors will love you for it! Call Centers are dynamic. Every year there is something new from the company that the call center must deal with. Everyone in the call center needs to adapt to these changes. Yet the agents and supervisors are still looking at the same metrics, responding to the same thresholds and seeing the same reports from last year.

If the call center has experienced any changes at all the reports, thresholds and metrics should change as well. In addition, agents that have finished another successful year probably have been promoted or at least are doing something more advanced. These agents should not be looking at the same old tired metrics and have the same threshold levels as last year.

Now is the time to review the status of your call center and make some changes that will make you boss of the year. Agents and supervisors will love you for updating their metrics and threshold settings because you have shown you are aware of what they are doing.

Status and Performance Reporting

When it comes to real time reporting for the call center there are two categories of report types: Status Reporting and Performance Reporting. At a glance these two types of reports look very similar, however, there are subtle differences. Knowing what these differences are and selecting the correct reports for your call center will make your reporting successful.

Status Reporting is for the call center that is mature, has agents that perform at a high level and need very little training and coaching. This call center knows what they are doing, knows their SLA's, the agents know their goals and regularly achieve them. This call center will have turnover that is lower than the industry average and have agents that adhere to their schedules.

Reports for real time status will include these KPI's:

• Calls in Queue
• Service Level
• Calls Abandoned
• Oldest Call Waiting
• Average Speed of Answer
• Average Handle Time

There are other KPI's that call center will include which will depend on the call center, the industry, the agent performance and other factors. The KPI's shown above are the critical metrics a call center that is performing at a high level should see.

Performance Reporting is for the call center that needs encouragement to reach their goals, has turnover that is higher than industry averages, does a lot of training and coaching and still misses their SLA's. This call center, large or small, seems to be on a roller coaster - some days the agents do very well other days not so well. This type of call center needs performance statistics that show how they are performing and what needs to be done.

Reports for real time perfomance will include these KPI's:

• Calls in Queue
• Oldest Call Waiting
• Average Speed of Answer
• Calls Abandoned Rate (Percent)
• Agent (Schedule) Adherence Rate
• Agents Available

These metrics help the agents with awareness which is typically lacking in an underperforming call center. To help the underperforming call center improve agent performance reporting is the best alternative.

Breaking down these reporting types further into more granular types there are Agent Status and Performance reports, Team Leader Status and Performance reports, and Call Center (Manager) Status and Performance reports. These reports become more targeted and granular and further help the call center improve.

For call center reporting to be successful and help the content in the report must be appropriate. providing the information can be de-motivating. To select the right type of reporting the manager must take a hard look at the call center and determine if they are a successful or an underperforming call center. Once the manager realizes what type of call center they have steps can be taken to offer the right information to the agents, team leaders, and manager.

Contact Center Statistics or Performance Metrics

There is a difference between statistics and performance metrics. Both are very helpful to the contact center but are used in two different ways. Confusing the two can be costly if you are purchasing a solution to improve the efficiency of your call center.

Statistics can provide a view of what is happening in the call center right now, for the interval or for the day. These statistics are helpful when the agents, team leaders and managers want to know the current status of the call center. Good statistics that show the status of the call center are:
Average Handle Time (AHT) or Average Call Handle Time (ACHT)
Service Level (SL%)
Abandon Rate (ABN%)
Average Speed Answer (ASA)
Longest Wait Time (LWT)
Calls in Queue (CIQ)
ACD Time (ACDT)
There are many more statistics that are available and each Call Center manager needs to determine what is best for their call center. These statistics and more are available from your ACD.

Performance metrics provide a different picture of the contact center. While statistics show us what is going on for our call center from our point of view performance metrics will show you what your customers think of your agents and call center. The team leader or call center manager may be aware of the call center status (statistics) but not aware of what the customers think of the call center or how well we are doing compared to our goals (performance metrics).

Performance metrics can provide a view of what our customers think of our call center and how we are doing compared to our goals. For example a recent study showed that agents thought their customer satisfaction rate was above 80% while the customer gave a satisfaction rating of just above 60%. Some performance statistics that are useful to the call center manager are:
First Call Resolution (FCR%)
Customer Satisfaction (CSat%)
Agent Utilization Rate (AUR%)
Cost per Contact (CoC)
Average Speed Answer (ASA)
Abandonment Rate (ABN%)

These metrics will provide a true picture of performance in the call center, identify strengths and weaknesses, and help establish goals for the call center and agents. Used properly these same metrics can be used in a scorecard (A single weighted number that shows how well the call center is performing, today)

Each contact center needs to select the metrics and statistics that are appropriate based on the businesses industry. However, it is not unusual for a single contact center to have different metrics for different groups.


So to truly improve the efficiency of the contact Performance Metrics are the better option. These metrics provide a view of the contact center from the customers point of view and give the manager an image of what needs to be worked on to improve the contact center productivity and efficiency.

Unified Reporting for the Contact Center

Unified Reporting for the contact center goes beyond summarizing an ACD report for the team leaders or managers. True unified reporting is a multi-tiered process.

1. Identify the data and the sources where that data is stored;
2. Capture the data from disparate data silos;
3. Build the reports based on specific needs of the users;
4. Create alarms and alerts for the reports so key metrics that are in variance are highlighted;
5. Publish the reports to each level of the Contact Center from the agent to senior management.

Contact Centers store a tremendous amount of data and most never do anything with that information. Unified reporting provides the contact center the opportunity to increase agent and team leader efficiencies with real time reports showing their current status. Unified reporting also aides the manager and senior management with historical reporting and real time drill down to assess the contact centers productivity.