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inContact's Benchmark Assessment Tool Helps Improve Business

By Michelle Amodio, TMCnet Contributor

Contact center managers certainly have their work cut out for themselves. Companies spanning all industries and sizes can hurt their company image and credibility with their customers due to poor customer care experiences, and how the customer is taken care of relies heavily on how the call center functions. If you’re in the contact center business, what is one way of finding out how your center measures up? A simple contact center assessment is one good first step.

Cloud contact center provider inContact offers a Contact Center Benchmark Assessment tool that gives you an idea of how you’re doing, business-wise, and it’s as simple as asking a few questions. What benchmarking does is offer an industry average of how one is doing within the space, and inContact’s simple questionnaire is a good springboard to getting that information.

To get the most value from benchmark data, a contact center manager must first determine metrics and use them to compare with other call/contact centers of similar function size and customer profiles. Rather than seek out expensive analysts, inContact gives you the results after a five-minute assessment.

I put myself in the shoes of a contact center manager who isn’t doing so great and took the assessment for a spin. Using Aberdeen (News - Alert) Group’s research findings, and after rating my contact center pretty low on the spectrum of things, I clocked in at 49/100. The official rating even came with its own label. Unfortunately for me, my contact center is considered “laggard.” Other rankings include industry average and, of course, best-in-class.

But the good news is inContact immediately provided me with information to better my contact center, including a specific report that caters to my contact center needs. I was given a complimentary copy of Aberdeen Group's 2013 analyst report The Hidden ROI of a Cloud-based Contact Center, which contained some valuable insight into running a well-oiled machine, from business performance measurement and technology facilitators to bettering the customer experience.

The benchmark assessment asks questions like: What is the percentage change in your agent utilization rate? What is your percentage change in annual company revenue? What is the percentage change in your average handle time? These are all essential questions that every contact center should know the answer to. In my case, I wasn’t in the know 100 percent, so of course my contact center had some room for improvement.

Benchmarking allows you and your team to know where your call/contact center stands today. This creates an understanding of how your operation rates as compared to other call centers and also provides a baseline measurement against which future changes can be compared. A handful of the key performance indicators (KPI) that most call centers track are provided within inContact’s assessment. A thorough benchmarking audit will consider the impact of these variables on your organization and customize them to meet your needs.

To see how your contact center measures up, take a few moments to answer a few questions and see what inContact has to say for your center.