The idea of call center benchmarking is pretty simple. You compare your contact center’s performance to the performance of top-level contact centers in your business sector and in the contact center industry as a whole. If the benchmark is done properly you will also glean an abundance of information on how these top level call centers achieved success. You can then use that information to develop new process for your own contact center and emulate the successful strategies.

Your benchmarking efforts must be structured and systematic, but still be flexible enough to allow innovation for gathering new information. If you are not experienced in call center benchmarking, then you will want to hire an outside consulting firm to help you.

The call center benchmarking process has four phases: planning, analysis, integration and action.

Call Center Benchmarking Process

Phase 1: Planning Phase

This phase is the most important because the information that is gathered has to be completely error-free since all remaining phases will be built on the benchmarking information from this phase.

In this phase, contact center management will identify which processes in their contact center are most relevant from the customer point of view. In this phase you will have to decide on the effective use of new processes, the potential benefits and costs of switching to these new processes and the time-frame for the transition.

Phase 2: Analysis Phase

In this phase you analyze the data collected in the planning phase. From the data, you must tease out the reasons for other contact centers having better benchmarking outcomes. From this analysis, new processes will be developed for your contact center. The goal is to create a process that is better than the process your using as the benchmark.

Phase 3: Integration Phase

This phase is the connection between the first two phases (planning and analysis) and the fourth phase, action. After upper management has approved the proposed changes to the call center processes, the organization can move ahead and integrate the new processes.

Management has to be committed for this phase to play out properly and new functional goals have to be agreed upon.

Phase 4: Action Phase

Implementation occurs during the action phase. In this phase a plan is developed, a time schedule is created, responsibility for implementation is assigned, and targets are set.

Upper management has to be involved in the action phase and they have to be accountable for each new process being implemented. Once a new process is up and running, there must be a report that describes all of the benefits of this new process.

Call center benchmarking is a very in depth field and this article is just a basic outline of the process. If you want help from call center benchmarking specialists, contact the SQM Group. They have been doing call center benchmarking for contact centers since 1996.