Every busy call centre has its challenges whether the team is qualifying prospects, taking orders, providing customer service, or delivering technical support. Call center monitoring and management requires key, real-time and historical data to maintain a smooth running call center machine while creating the best customer experience. So how do we pull that all together for call centers that support different business functions? We are glad you asked!
Success of a call center organization depends on 3 things:
To make sure a call centre delivers on those three pillars, there are some key metrics that need to be measured and monitored.
Whether you have a single queue software or multiple queues for sales, escalations, customer service, technical support or customer success, there are some standard metrics that you need to monitor in real-time and historically including:
Related: What is a call queue?
In addition, you need this functionality:
Call data alone is valuable, but call data, when mashed up with data from other operational systems like Google Analytics, CRM, Help Desk Ticket System, etc…, is an invaluable business tool that can give you unprecedented insight into your business.
Does your call center experience busy times of the year or quiet times? Of course, they do! These peaks and valleys could be based on the calendar year start and end, typical vacation and holiday periods or maybe you may see a spike in activity as a result of a business trigger such as a PR announcement, new product or promotion. In any case, these trends are essential to identify but most importantly, prepare for so they don’t come as a surprise and service don’t suffer.
It’s not enough to have measures of success and goals and it is not enough to hit those numbers.
Get everyone on the same page. Dashboards of the metrics that need to be hit by a team or individuals don’t need to be kept hidden on a supervisors or managers screen. Create an environment where the entire team knows where they stand with the transparent sharing of data team and even company-wide. It’s what we do here at net2phone, and it’s great to see everyone with a vested interest in seeing us hit our goals as individuals, team and as a company.
Increase team engagement. When you hit a team goal – celebrate! When someone demonstrates exemplary performance – recognize and reward them. Make it a competition and gamify the experience with dashboards highlighting high performers, recognition company-wide and rewards for over achievers.
PRO TIP: Get everyone on the same page. Customer Success is Everyone’s job. At net2phone, we don’t let calls go unanswered or let anyone stay in the queue for more than 2 minutes. It’s not a goal; it’s just the way we do business every single day. Empower other teams to answer the phone, even if it isn’t their job, to take a message and get that message into the right hands for a swift response.
Related: 12 best practices for effective call queue management
We all have data that can be easily captured by the call center that shows us trends based on times of the year, geo locations, customer demographics, buying cycles, product purchases, etc. that can teach us more about our business. Call center stats aren’t just for call centers and can benefit the entire organization including product development, marketing, customer success, and most certainly your executive team. Be sure to share any trends that you uncover about people contacting your company beyond your call center team. It may provide insight that other organizations can leverage to do business…well…better, attract the best customers and deliver the types of products and services your ideal customers wants and needs.
Check out reporting available via net2phone Unite to gain valuable business insights from the data being generated from your call center every day!