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How Call Center Bench-marking is Constructive for your Business

Benchmarking

Many organizations have started appreciating bench-marking as an all important function for a well managed call center. It can be defined as the measurement and comparison of standards and practices, within an organization and/or with other operations externally.

Call center bench-marking gives you access to new tools for decision-making, improving efficiencies, and gaining insights. These are so valuable that call center managers eventually come round to adopting bench-marking and making it an intrinsic part of their work.

Why Call Center Bench-marking is Necessary?

Call center bench-marking offers tremendous benefits to a call center. It enables to compare its business processes, as well as their performance vis-à-vis that of the leaders in the industry. Moreover, it enables call center operators to detect their strength and weaknesses so that the information can be used to make significant improvements in business processes.

If call centers compare themselves against industry’s finest more frequently, they will get more clarity into specific issues faced by them. A good example of this can be high absenteeism among agents and how other call centers are handling such issues.

Bench-marking can remove the element of guesswork from call center management. Thereby, executives no longer have to resort to their ‘gut feelings’ and can rely on factual data instead. It is also useful in establishing a healthy competition among the rivals and a strong urge to be as good as the best call center in the industry, if not better.

Categories of Bench-marking

Paul Gardner, who is an associate director at Xantus Consulting, said that when a call center wants to deploy the process of bench-marking for the first time, it has to note down the areas where it should mainly focus on.

The key to the success is not to benchmark each and every performance criteria at a single go, but necessarily to focus more on some of the categories that are higher on the priority list. Thus, it is vital to ask the following questions.

Approaches to Call Center Bench-marking

After making a decision on which elements should be focused for bench-marking, the next step for a call center manager is to ascertain which technique of bench-marking is most appropriate for them.

There are some bench-marking methods that are costlier than others. If a call center management wants to employ a consultant to conduct a detailed quantitative bench-marking exercise, it can be pretty expensive.

However, there are some qualitative approaches that can be undertaken through discussions with other call center managers. They can be quite cheap, but can only focus on limited amount of data.

Types of Call Center Bench-marking techniques

Advantages of Bench-marking in a Call Center

There are several ways of bench-marking at a call center and not all of them are expensive. For instance an easy way to assess the performance of the rival call centers can be done when a manager chats with a peer. This technique may not deliver quantitative data every time, but it can be used as a starting point for the bench-marking exercise.

Irrespective of what technique a call center manager chooses to use for the bench-marking exercise, it is important to note is that actions should be taken on the findings, to achieve success through the entire exercise.

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