Of all the things that technology has taken over to make our lives easier, perhaps one of the most important is the advent of the ubiquitous call centre. Found everywhere, call centers have completely changed how business is conducted, across the world. It is estimated that almost $2 trillion of commerce is attributable to call centers.

Why Have Call Centers Become So Important?

Irrespective of what industry or business one belongs to, one aspect that cannot be ignored is customer support. Given the intense competition today between various enterprises, one of the differentiating factors is customer support and problem redressal – and often, businesses cannot allocate the requisite manpower or infrastructure to handle all of these grievances and queries personally. This is where the call centers come into play, providing businesses an assisting platform with various ancillary services.

People nowadays often do not have the patience to wait for email responses to their queries, and it is for this reason that a lot of organisations prefer resorting to call center services for their outsourcing needs.

However, it is important to remember that not all call centers are helpful, and nor do they assist in propelling your business. A lot of call centers are spam and bombard customers with unwanted calls and unnecessary content. This leads to burnout, and customers sometimes tend to avoid picking calls even when legitimate businesses attempt to reach out to them. Further, given that a lot of financial transactions are operated through phones nowadays, people are wary of answering calls that might be considered spam due to security concerns and the risk of potential fraud. However, there are ways to check whether the call center is effective and one of them is to examine call center metrics.

What Exactly Are These Metrics And What Parameters Do They Measure?

Before jumping into aspects such as the effectivity and productiveness of your outsourcing plan, it is helpful to understand what metrics are important to examine. Amongst many others, the most important and commonly tracked metrics include operational skills, productivity of agents, overall customer satisfaction, number of customers repeated, and feedback. These KPIs or key performance indicators provide a bird’s eye view of the effectiveness (or lack of thereof) of the call center.

Of all metrics, perhaps the most important is the effectiveness of the call center agent. Given that the agent is in contact with the customer or client, it is important that the agent is motivated to do their best, and redress client concerns and queries effectively. With performance based incentives and monitoring of KPIs, incentivising agents to perform better becomes easier.

Apart from these, there are various other metrics that are measured such as the time taken to respond to a customer, the number of calls answered, whether there has been a successful redressal of customer queries and complaints, satisfaction and various other productivity metrics for the agent.

Today, a lot of companies are choosing to automate their responses, but nothing can replace the human touch that comes from a call center. It is for this reason that call centers today are still immensely popular.