The pressure is on for call centers today: they are expected to provide the best possible customer support to many different customers across multiple channels, offering the same quality service regardless of media, keeping the customer relationship positive and engaged and extracting a maximum of intelligence from interactions with customers so they can boost sales and generate repeat business.
The global economic environment hasn’t helped with this goal. Technology budgets are still tight, and call center managers are under pressure to work miracles with existing systems. The goals seem to be set higher every year, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to meet them.
But the truth of the matter is that many call centers are still in the dark when it comes to how to set their goals and what results they are supposed to be achieving. For this reason, it’s becoming increasingly recognized that benchmarking is an essential function for a properly managed customer contact center. Benchmarking offers insights, efficiencies and aids to decision-making that help contact center managers ensure that they are running operations that are in line with professional standards.
Benchmarking organization BenchmarkPortal (News - Alert) and its Certified Center of Excellence program has helped many call centers implement best practices programs and stick to them, resulting in better customer satisfaction and loyalty, expanded revenue and lowered call center agent turnover.
BenchmarkPortal’s Certified Center of Excellence program and its rigorous certification process helps call centers reference all their performance goals to BenchmarkPortal’s best practice database of thousands of call centers, helping organizations attain performance levels that improve their competitive position rather than simply adhering to arbitrary performance goals that may not be particularly effective.
BenchmarkPortal has collected key performance indicators from thousands of contact centers worldwide, creating the world's largest database of best practices statistics. Call center organizations can use these reports to compare themselves against industry peers to establish an objective baseline of current performance. It helps managers identify a call center’s strengths to be cultivated and any weaknesses that need to be addressed.
Call centers spend a lot of time tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) and collect a great deal of data. Most of this is useless, however, unless managers understand what they ought to be doing with these numbers and how they can use the data to increase performance in the call center. Thanks to benchmarking, customer support centers can set goals and gain a better idea of how to attain them.
For more information about BenchmarkPortal, visit www.benchmarkportal.com.
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Edited by Stefanie Mosca