What is important for commercial performance of a call center?

Probably the most important for the success of a call center is capacity. You need to be able to support the volume of calls coming in. You will also need a powerful enough call processor to take the calls, provide directory services and auto-attendant features and eventually relay the incoming calls to the right people.

One way to determine the capacity that would be required is to use the Erlang tables. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erlang_unit for more details on these tables and how to asses call volume and capacity.

I hope this answers your question at least in part.

Regards
--
Miky Dinescu www.digitalgetto.com

Salary difference between the 'recruited' and 'replaced'.

Subhas C Biswas

Jason Augustine

The bread and butter for a call center is call volume, so you're going to want to find ways to maximize your call volume and call handling. Assuming you have the technical infrastructure to support a high call volume and the appropriate front-end marketing/advertising campaigns to drive sufficient traffic through your call center, here are my recommendations around how to structure your compensation and/or performance programs to support the high-volume needs:

Reward low Average Handle Times (AHT): most call center phone systems will measure AHT, or the average time an employee spends on the phone with a customer. The lower this number, the higher number of calls an employee can take in a given period. I'd suggest not linking a commission structure to AHT, but this should certainly be single measure within a larger overall performance standard.

Reward number of calls (volume): there is a direct correlation between low AHT and high number of calls, but you want to avoid latency between calls. Another measure to be used as one part of an overall performance standard is total calls answered, or basic call volume. It's very a very simple measurement, and one that is addressed by most call center phone systems.

Reward call quality: the major pitfall of putting too much emphasis on the two items I noted above is that you can start to get some undesired behavior and ignoring of customer inquiries. To deter employees from dropping calls or redirecting them back into the queue in order to reduce AHT and drive up call volume, you need to provide a mechanism for measuring behaviors while employees are on calls.

While managing call centers at pacific Bell/SBC for several years, I used a combination of anonymous, remote monitoring and desk-side "ride alongs." In both cases, managers would observe calls to insure that employees met certain objective performance standards and exhibited certain behaviors. This helped in the overall performance management of employees at large, but also had the added benefit of deterring employees from dumping calls in order to manipulate their metrics.

Of course, there are a number of other performance measures you can look at, including specific product sales, etc., but these are key measures to look at initially.

Wade Armstrong suggests this expert on this topic:

* Dorothy Macdonald
http://www.linkedin.com/profile?viewProfile=&key=1550850&authToken=IOIE&authType=name&goback=%2Eamq%2Eavq_58622_8406612_1_1203244826317%2Emid_137526399%2Eavq_58622_8406612_0_*2
Clarification added 7 months ago:

(Although Dorothy is now in the entertainment field, she has extensive experience in this area)

In the case of call centers the single most important performance factor are capacity and a quality control program to assure customer satisfaction
HelpDesks and ServiceDesks are different stories, though.




HelpDesk Coordinator at Grundfos