Call Center QA Featured Article
Is Time Really Money? Call Monitoring and Cost Per Call
To many people, the customer experience is an ambiguous, subjective concept. In a way, they are right. However, there are various ways to try to quantify this idea, and call centers have focused on a number of metrics to try to nail down exactly what needs to be done to improve customer service.
Balance is important when utilizing these metrics. Spending large amounts of time and money on each individual customer is a surefire way to guarantee customer satisfaction. But that certainly does not make for good business, and with such a strategy, there may not even be a business to complain about for much longer.
One such metric that call centers often use to try to evaluate agent performance is cost per call. Simply put, cost per call is determined by dividing the agent’s hourly pay rate by the number of calls an agent handles per hour. For example, if I handled 15 calls in the last hour, and I make $12 an hour, my resulting cost per call for that hour is $0.80.
Of course, this number changes wildly throughout the day, so you must first find the average number of calls an agent makes or receives per hour by taking the total number of calls handled during the day and dividing it by the total number of hours worked. Increase your sample to an entire month, or year, and you have a much more accurate number of how your agents are performing.
Many companies naturally look to reduce their cost per call, primarily by employee strategies intended to reduce the length of any given call. This isn’t entirely the best strategy, as sometimes extra time is taken to complete up-sells or cross-sells, which cost-per-call metrics cannot take into account. A rushed call agent, of course, is going to leave the customer feeling neglected, so a balance must be struck.
Third-party remote call monitoring solutions, such as those offered by BPA, allow call center managers to identify exactly which strategies lead to both lower costs per call and happy customers (and vice versa). Managers can then share this information with their agents, improving productivity across the board. Moreover, call monitoring solutions can help identify what sequences of events are most likely to lead to an extended conversation or sale, which can bring increased revenues beyond what would be saved by a speedy transaction.
So, companies looking to get the most of their agent’s time and effort can find a powerful ally in 3rd-party remote call monitoring, and perhaps can get a better grip on the illusive customer experience.
Edited by Rory J. Thompson
