Integrating Calibration in Your Call Center

Calibration is standardizing a process by determining its deviation from the standard in order to determine the proper correction factors. In a call center, calibration is a critical factor of improving call-monitoring performance. It is the process by which the deviations in the way performance are interpreted are limited. 

You have to know if your company needs some type of monitoring system, call monitoring system or automated system. Your organization should be committed to improving call quality. Supervisors should put out fires, answer questions, write reports, sign off on timesheets, handles escalated calls and solve the customer service problems to institute a call monitoring program. You have your customer service representatives or CSRs in place and they should know what they need to know. They should work professionally and they have to provide the customers with the correct and sufficient information. They should also have proper speaking and listening skills. 

Monitoring programs in a call center is very important for its success. To design such programs, you have to identify the key performance criteria that result in successful calls. These include product knowledge and listening skills. Listening skills could include not interrupting the caller, not asking the caller to repeat the information, etc. You have to determine the overall weight for each criterion in the total score, select the scoring method for each criterion, define the monitoring process and performance benchmarks, train all call center members about the performance criteria and benchmarks and lastly, conduct calibration sessions to work out any bugs before you begin live monitoring. 

Every step in the process is crucial for the program’s success. Nevertheless, the calibration process is often unnoticed. It is essential to incorporate calibration into the planning, implementation and ongoing maintenance of your monitoring program. Calibration is the best way to prevent assertion of inequity and favoritism. It also eliminates bias by ensuring consistent scoring. In calibration in call center, the result of the monitoring and scoring is always the same so it will not matter who ever did it. CSRs should understand this so that the coaching process can focus on recognizing achievements and identifying opportunities for improvement, instead of whether a particular score is accurate. 

Calibration is not an easy process. It takes a significant obligation. It may take so much time of discussion and practice before your team begins to score a call in a uniform way, while it is complicated, the rewards will be considerable.

How Employees are Evaluated

Customers’ response helps to evaluate employees’ phone performance. Employees' performance are evaluated using a voice loggingsystem. The call center agents’ conversations with the callers are recorded by the voice logger. The trainer may pull 15 minutes of recordings on each callcenter agent and then they both listen to the calls that were handled. The trainer evaluates their tone of voice, how they handled that account, if the phone number was repeated back to the caller, and if they asked the caller to spell their last name. And if you think you are following this procedure, you will certainly get positive comments about your service. 

You can pull call centre agents’ statistics out of your equipment everyday, look at the total logged-in time, in-rotation time, talk time, average hold time, number of messages taken compared to number of calls answered, and average ring time. Looking at in-rotation time and logged-in time shows how long the call center agent are in rotation and answering phone calls.  

If an employee shows up at work on time and is in-rotation for most of their shift, answered a lot of calls and took messages, they should be paid more than the employee who was in rotation but let calls roll off their screen to another customer service representative. It would be nice if each employee would start at a base rate. It would be up to them to determine how much they want to make per hour.

Setting Up Your Call Center Campaign

This article informs you about the five set up questions every marketer should ask regarding call centre campaign according to Stewart White, a call center Senior Consultant. 

In the decision about setting up acall center campaign, campaign strategy should be set and offers should be created. Load and select the call lists and the campaign is ready to roll and you can hand off to the call center. You have to recognize and correct the common problems in setting up the campaign. These are the questions that are needed to be asked before starting a new campaign.

1.      Are my campaign objectives clear and are my targets properly set?

Two of the most important steps in successful callcenter campaign execution are the objective and target setting. You can assure that customers will not be able to resist the opportunity to purchase because of setting and clearly communicating the objectives and targets for every campaign.

2.      Are poor quality leads reducing my response rates and increasing campaign costs?

Having bad leads in your call lists is costly. Every incorrect lead is a wasted call that costs you money and time without the chance of a sale besides; bad leads can take the place of the good leads that can produce sales. Ensure that all leads are of good quality and relevant to the campaign objectives. Leads must be audited and tested before the call center campaign “go live”.

3.      Am I discarding lists because I think they are too small?

When setting up campaigns for a call center, it is important to consider the list sizes. Small list sizes sometimes get canned due to the misconception that they will be too expensive to run through a dialer. What you have to do is to make the small list a “split” of a larger list to maintain your operational efficiencies and reduces administration costs. 

4.      Are my “mostly likely to buy” customers being called first?

You have to put your best prospects that you think will be easier to talk with at the top of the list and watch the results fly. Getting more conversions faster will also give you the opportunity to move onto other high yielding call centre campaigns. This also helps motivate consultants as they move through the list, increasing their confidence and giving them experience before they encounter the harder sales down the list. http://www.what-is-call-center.com

5.      Are my campaign dialer settings costing me results?

Like all technology, dialers must be used the proper way or it can mean lost opportunities to service customers and make sales. Many dialers have the ability to generate excellent results by automatically recalling engaged or busy numbers or sequentially calling alternative numbers from a customer’s file when numbers are not answering or engaged. 

As the person responsible for the callcenter campaign success, you have to provide the instructions or business rules to the call center to ensure that you gain the highest yields from your campaign lists.  

Whenever you are setting up a new campaign for a call center, ask yourself these few questions to ensure that you get the best results possible right from the start.

Outsource Customer Satisfaction

There are three keys to be successful in outsourcing your call center operations. You can apply these whether you are to outsource inbound or outbound callcenter, offshore or domestic, telephone-focused or mixed online/telephone contact or whether it is aimed at consumers, business to business or internal company employees.

The keys of a successful outsourcing commitment are: 1) Careful evaluation of potential service provider 2) The strength of the relationship structured from the beginning 3) The dedication to manage the relationship throughout its life

This may be straightforward yet it is simple. Call centers are the tools for any business for the true customer satisfaction.

Proper mindset is required to achieve the difficult-to-quantify goal of customer satisfaction. It also requires more accurate assessment and proper management of the service provider’s ongoing performance.

Traditionally, the call centers are used mainly as a way to consolidate and handle issues and concerns and outsourcing of callcenter operations tended to be cost-driven. The service provider is chosen by the companies based on easily measured factors such as talk time or speed to answer and providers who perform well in these areas and delivered service at the lowest prices where the ones that thrived. While today, more companies are considering the relationship, sales, marketing potential of the call centers and they are looking for the providers with well-trained agents who can effectively represent the contracting company and work towards its goals.

In evaluating a service provider, it is crucial for the company to understand easily the types of individuals the provider hires as agents, how these call center agents are trained and how the technology are utilized to support these agents and measure their performance. It is hard to find the right people for these positions. Client references should be checked thoroughly and a site visit is highly recommended.

Visiting service provider’s facility allows you to see the operation and how the call centre people and facility are working in it for your company. You have to see how the agents perform and how they handle a variety of calls with the customers. Evaluating their performance help you judge whether they would make good representatives of your company.

Building a relationship with the service provider in which customer satisfaction is the goal that will be approached differently from one that is primarily service level-based. Service levels will always be important and must be accommodated and clearly stated in an outsourcing agreement, but they must also be balanced against the customer satisfaction objective. The agreement or the relationship should be flexible so it can handle the fine-tuning that may be necessary as time goes on.

The agreement should concentrate on making it possible for both the company and the service provider to achieve positive results by learning and building on each other’s shared strengths. Built into it is the proper change management tool that makes the agreement maintains alignment between both parties as conditions change.

Customer satisfaction requires strong, disciplined governance of the service provider and the outsourcing relationship. In selecting the members of the team, a company should look for the individuals with contact center experience who understand the importance of the call center relative to the large strategic objectives of the organization. An important team member should know how to lead the callcenter to the marketing and product quality departments, in order to influence the valuable information that the center generates on an ongoing basis.

The best outsourcing management is the combination of effective leadership, the right tools, intelligent processes, sensitive personnel, a mix of skills and strong guiding principles. A basis for a true partnership-oriented relationship delivers its potential through the effort in assuring that both the company and the service provider are operating from the shared principles.