Increasing need to estimate call center performance

Call center business owners know for a fact that they need to improve customer satisfaction to stay competitive in the industry.  There are so many call centers today and more competition means more work to do in maintaining good performance.  With so many alternatives now, one of the measures that contact centers take to ensure satisfaction of their customers is to estimate call center performance.Call centers are also referred to as contact centers sometimes.  Their main feature is customer service.  People employed in call centers receive and convey multiple requests from customers, usually by either telephone or emails.  Initially, big firms use call centers as extensions of their telecommunications service.  This is so because call centers serve as effective means of providing clients with customer or technical support.There are two types of calls that a call center caters to –inbound and outbound.  Inbound means that the customers are the ones contacting the firm for inquiries and service support.  The task of the call center agent is to help resolve the customer's problem.  If technical support is needed, the agent will normally forward the call to a skilled technical staff.  Outbound, meanwhile, pertains to the job responsibilities of the typical telemarketer.  The agents are the ones contacting customers to promote a certain service or product.Handling calls is a sensitive matter for every call center business because its main goal is to meet a customer's expectations.  This is where the need to evaluate call center operation comes in.  There are several indicators that call centers take note in assessing performance.   The commonly used indicator is the average handling time.A very common complaint of customers is the length of time they spend over the telephone just to have their problems resolved.  Most of the time, callers are busy people so they do not have the patience to wait for a call center agent to attend to his issue.  This is why it is important for agents to handle calls in at least minimal time and yet be able to resolve the problem of the customer.   Effectiveness therefore is a factor to ensure satisfaction of the callers.For the reason stated above, measuring the average handling time is a helpful indicator to assess call center performance.  Average handling time is defined as the average time spent in resolving a call.   It is a combination of the average time a caller is being put on hold and the average time that the caller is conversing with the agent.  The lesser time spent in resolving a call, the better.  This means that the agent is effective and he can take more calls and entertain more customers, thus increasing productivity.   Many call centers also conduct training to improve the ability of their agents handling calls.  This is actually a correct move for the call centers themselves.However, there are still other indicators in evaluating call center performance that need to be considered.  Among them is the percentage of successful or resolved calls, the number of calls that an agent can handle per hour, and many more.  Call centers can try all these measures or they can opt to come up with new ones.  The important thing is that they estimate call center performance to guarantee customer satisfaction.