February 23, 2012

Outsourcing Customer Service: Metric Talk

Outsourcing Customer Service: Metric Talk

By Ivana Lewis

The functions of the call center customer service are not one-dimensional. There are several different ways in which outsourcing customer service can prove to be a wise choice. There is a prevalent view among the smaller brands that they don't need a customer service call center because they are working with a close-knit group of customers.
 That sort of thinking is against the grain of progressive business ideas. Without customer service call centers backing your customer relationships, your business will stagnate and finally die a premature death. This is the age of the demanding customer.

They will expect certain standards from the work that you put up. Customer service outsourcing has changed from being a cost-only industry to quality-concentric operations.

To keep pace with the times, call centers have to take up the challenge.

Metrics play a very important role in call center customer service. Metrics define performance also enhance it. Without the right kind of metrics, the customer service call center will find itself tottering on the verge of under performance.

Its true that agents get de-motivated when you place unjustified targets on them. At the same time, if you are not getting your metrics right, you will be wondering why you have touched a certain glass ceiling in your work and cannot proceed further. Different customer service call centers have different metrics, according to the needs and goals of the project they are working on.

The demands of the telemarketing project should dictate the metrics. For example, if your client wants to allow the callers the indulgence of a longer time for a better experience at the customer service call center, the metrics that you use cannot possibly measure call lengths as the basis for the agents performance.

In such cases, the call center customer service can deploy other metrics to measure performance.

Many customer service call centers have a survey that they conduct on every caller. The caller is expected to respond with a satisfactory scale that ranges from Poor to Excellent. For each bad review, the agent earns a negative mark. These points add up for the monthly or weekly performance review of the customer service outsourcing team.

The benefit of this process is that the agents cannot complain of a bias in terms of evaluation. They will know exactly how they are doing when they read the feedback of the callers that they are attending. Its a system that works well when you outsource customer service.

The metrics that actually make a call center customer service effective is the FCR, or First Call Resolution. This percentage is calculated on how many people got their issues solved on the very instance of their calling the customer service call center. The call center has to track the incoming calls to figure out if the same caller calls back with the same problem twice or more.

It must be concluded that in such cases, the customer service outsourcing unit could not satisfy the problem that they were faced with. A review of this metric will make customer service call centers more efficient.
 

Ivana Lewis
The customer service call center that we run is known to be particular about performance metrics. We modulate our metrics according to the call center customer service project.



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