Call Accounting Solutions Can Help Contact Centers Track Important Quality Metrics
March 02, 2015
By Tracey E. Schelmetic
TMCnet Contributor
In the seemingly never-ending flow of calls that come into the average contact center every day, it’s easy to miss some of the information being communicated in those calls. But it’s even easier to miss what’s NOT there: the calls that didn’t get answered, or the calls that didn’t get returned, because of high volume, carelessness or an assumption that someone else would take care of those calls.
Many companies keep track of the calls they do answer, but pay little attention to the ones they don’t. Unfortunately, abandoned calls can have a powerful (and negative) effect on a customer’s perception of quality. Many customers whose calls are abandoned never bother to try again. While companies with large, complex contact center platforms may have the ability to keep track of these calls, many smaller companies don’t, and this is a real problem for small to medium-sized businesses trying to hold onto their customers, according to ISI Telemanagement Solutions, Inc., which produces the Infortel Select call accounting product.
“Contact centers are solely designed to provide customers the ability to interact with a company about its products,” wrote the company. “Unanswered calls or calls landing in voice mail are highly problematic and reflect poorly on an organization’s ability to provide useful and meaningful customer service. Infortel Select offers detailed metrics on answered and abandoned calls, ring-time summaries, and hourly, daily, and monthly statistics, allowing companies to truly gauge their call center’s effectiveness and giving them the opportunity to be proactive with their customer service approach.”
While call accounting products are usually implemented by companies in order to keep track of telecom usage, telecom costs and employee activity, an additional valuable use of these products include helping maintain call center quality metrics. The solutions, which can be used without formal contact center software, can help companies maintain information about a number of important metrics, including:
- Answered calls: the percentage of calls picked up
- Abandoned calls: the number and percentage of calls not answered
- Ring time to answer: how long it took, on average, for customer calls to be answered
- Ring time to abandoned: how long the average abandoned call rang
These metrics can be tracked hourly in order to identify which parts of the day are the most problematic, and agents can be tracked individually or by work group to determine where the most problems are occurring (at which time, schedules can be adjusted or remedial training can be offered). Managers can customize their dashboard to provide them with precisely the information they need about call metrics when and where they need it, and they can even generate a list of abandoned phone numbers, including cell phone numbers, so agents can engage in outbound work to re-connect with customers whose calls were missed.
While not every small businesses may require full-featured contact center solutions, every company with a call center presence – even if it’s only a few agents – needs to the ability to ensure all customer contacts are handled properly in a timely manner. The cost of not doing so is simply too high.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi