Very often, when planning cooperation with an outsourcing contact center, customers have a question about how to evaluate the performance of its work. And this is an important enough moment, which will be decisive both for the conclusion of long-term partnership relations and for understanding that the money of the customer of telemarketing services was not spent in vain. That is why all professional call centers at the end of their work provide detailed reports on their activities and the results that were obtained. And help in assessing the performance of the call center key performance indicators, which can be used to judge the success of the telephone campaign conducted for the customer.

Key indicators of call center performance

The average duration of the conversation. Almost any PBX, and even more so the technical and software equipment of modern call centers, will allow you to get any data related to the duration of calls and conversations themselves. So, in order to get the average duration of a conversation, it is necessary to divide the total time of conversations – without taking into account the time of the call itself, hold, etc. – by the number of conversations. – by the number of conversations.  To assess the performance of the call center, this indicator is key, and if you want to assess the net efficiency of the call center, you should stipulate to the call center that it must necessarily be in the report. Professional call centers with a long experience fix this indicator in the reports on their work by default. Number of lost calls. This indicator is important for the work of operators on the incoming line, and the loss of calls is often not their fault. Sometimes the reason lies in technical aspects, and sometimes – in the elementary lack of working hands. To understand how effectively the call center has worked in this direction, it is necessary to take data from the PBX. Call centers, which for some reason can not do this, can track the number of lost calls by the operator: what number of calls is recorded in his report, and then subtract from them those that operators within a given telephone campaign received and recorded. This is how you can get the number of lost calls. Then you can compare this figure with the total number of calls to assess the performance of the call center in percentage terms. If it turns out to be too high – it will directly indicate that for any of the reasons the work was not done well. All the following actions of the customer in this case should be regulated according to the contract concluded with the call center, which in this matter will play a key role, if it is not closed in the course of verbal clarification of the reasons. Operators’ workload. This indicator is important not as much for the customer as for the management of the call center itself. It allows you to understand how competently the call center resources are distributed and the performance of the call center according to this distribution as a whole. This value is calculated in percentages – it is a share of the sum of time of conversations of operators on the line from their total time at work, of course, without taking into account the lunch break. Cost of conversation. This figure is also important to the management of the call center, it is considered quite simple: the total cost of the call center is taken: the payroll, the cost of rent, the cost of products (tea, coffee, sugar), stationery and other expenses. After that, the resulting figure should be divided by the number of conversations. This indicator will not be relevant in the context of one of the others for reporting to the customer. Nevertheless, within the framework of determining the performance of the call center for internal reporting, this is not the last indicator that management should systematically pay attention to. So, before moving on to ordering services and paying for them, the customer should always be interested in the reporting that he will receive at the end of the phone campaign. Both parties should understand and compare the desired and expected results with those that can be tracked after the fact and systematized in a convenient form. Such agreements at the initial stage will avoid difficulties and misunderstandings in the future, so it is not worth ignoring and underestimating the details within the framework of assessing the performance of the call center. Otherwise, how else will the customer be able to understand that the call center has done the maximum for the realization of its task and made every possible effort for this purpose.