Good Morning Everyone:
I heard about CCV through a contact and I'm very impressed with the site. I do have a question. I just started up a Customer Care Center several months ago. I only have 4 Customer Care Specialists at the present time. I am witha Logistics company that leases our software applicatons to the customer. If the customer has a technical problem with their software, they call us. Presently, I am using Centervu and Tivoli as our phone call and problem management tools. We will be changing over to Peregrine within the next few months. Our inbound calls are lasting about 4 minutes. We also make outbound calls to get back with our customers on follow-up issues, etc. Unfortunately, our outbound call volume is sometimes a 2 to 1 or 3 to 1 ratio compared to our inbound calls and that is determined by the types of technical issues we are dealing with. Presently, the outbound calls last about a minute and a half. Our Specialists also have to complete a "ticket" in for every inbound call received and that takes about 4 to 6 minutes to complete with the Tivoli system. With Peregrine we hope to cut that time in half.

My question is this: Are there basic productivity standards for our type of environment that I can get my hands on. I anticipate that I will be creating my own standards, but none the less, I'd like to know if there is already something out there I can compare to. Any feedback or direction would be great appreciated. Thx. Mike Colbert/Customer Care Center Manager

I agree with David. If you measure fast answering, that's what you'll get. While you can't throw out the traditional (easy to count) measurements - cuz finance folks measure your performance and the understand easy to measure - you must find a way to give your employees a more satisfying goal to meet.

I agree. We need to keep our representatives motivated. So, I am building time into their day for a reasonable amount of breaks, plus follow-up time, meeting time, and even self/career development time. I want my team to get involved in the "conceptual" design of our software or release upgrades and this will allow them to share their ideas with our QA, Project Management and Architect teams.
What do you think? Thx. Mike C.

Mike

Going back to your original question. To be frank the only people you should be measuring your performance with are your customers...

I know there's a mega industry out there who say benchmarking is good, BUT the vast majority areignoring how their customers really feel in the race to compare with ABC Inc who 'appear' to be 'better' because they answer their calls faster or whatever.

The only 'real' measure of your success is your bottom line. If you are dealing with your customers in a manner that they find helpful and appropriate then you will be contributing to the $ value of your company as your customers will see and they will talk about your caring for them etc.

If you start down the 'numbers road' you will find that your daily focus will shift from being your real, i.e. external, customers to your internal customers who, after all said and done, do not buy your products and therefore do not pay your salary.

Thoughts?

David

I agree with David. you have to set benchmarks within your own organization. Each organization is different and the average talk time for your organization might be 2 minutes where mine is 3 minutes. There are alot of variables that play a part. We focus on our abandon calls rate and whether our agents are available when they should be. There's one call center we have where we signed a contract that we have to answer the call within 30 seconds. You might want to set a goal like that and see if theycan achieve it.

Mike, you might consider looking at COPC (www.copc.com) It is a contact center certification program that we (being sykes)support. The program helps you establish not only performance benchmarks against industry standards, but it also provides a roadmap for identifying, measuring, and driving continous process improvement. (it is kinda like the ISO9000 for call centers)

Good Luck.

A good benchmark is how many repeat calls you get.

Encourage employees to devote time to resolving the query first time.
This means the customer doesn't have to call back so there are less calls in the queue and the calls are answered with less waiting time.

The custome is left with the impression that you are a caring and efficient company.

This was regarding benchmarking for every department of the call center. These benchmarking would be done against manuals prepared for each department i.e training manual, operations manual, H R manual ....

Are there any guidelines apart from COPC which could guide me through the making of a manual for our upcoming manual. I do have some guidelines however would be interested in knowing more from exprienced call centers.