The first step of calculating the cost per call in a call center is to compile a list of all the call center agents working for your center. • Suppose that a call center receives λ calls per hour. Perhaps our Delhi outlet is located on the ground level of a busy mall while our Chennai outlet is off the beaten track in a low traffic area. Jim Murphy is right this is a very loaded question. We have hundreds of expert articles and free tools like an Erlang C calculator, a comprehensive CX & call centre glossary, Phonetic Alphabet and a growing library of guides and podcasts to help you learn. On average, call-center representatives receive between $10 and $30 per hour. But the 50 excellent calls … Furthermore, call centers in Eastern Europe or Latin America normally feature rates from $9-$14/hour. We have (8) online Quizzes available to help you prepare as well as test your knowledge. Specialized outbound services with U.S. agents can cost $35-$50 per hour. The Calls Per Hour metric is used to measure performance outputs for contact centre frontline agents working across different shift times that receive different call volumes. Of course, if someone looks like they’re operating outside the range and on the high side it could be either: a) they are in fact working too fast (and thus Quality falls – such as the taste of the pizza), b) they’ve discovered some kind of process or quality innovation that should be studied and replicated across our other chefs. Home How to use the True Calls per Hour Calculation in the Contact Centre. Ok – let me show you how we normalize the figures so that we can compare them fairly. Whether it is to improve efficiency, increase customer satisfaction, improve staff engagement and so on we share free resources, expert articles and thought leadership to help progress and promote our industry. For Ireland/Germany/Singapore (name your market or city) we know that on a Saturday afternoon shift the right rate of call handling that delivers on quality is about 12 – 15 calls per hour; Our night shift Team calls per hour achievement will always be lower than our day shift Team calls per hour … There are many metrics to consider for strategic success, which can be chosen to support the goals of the organization running an outbound call center program. Prachi is working at the rate/speed of 25.3 pizzas per hour. It’s an advanced operations technique – for advanced Centres – but very powerful. Contact Centres could learn from their example. Define the time period for which you want to calculate the cost per call (hour/day/week/month/quarter/year). To make the model work, we assume that the calls arrive according to a Poisson process (i.e., time between the calls is exponential) and each call … Service Level. For this particular utility, who had several million customers, the net effect was a decrease of almost a million calls per year and a savings of more than $7 million a year! But it’s something that Contact Centre leaders should know and be able to use. However, you must keep in mind that this number can fluctuate due to seasonal call … In this free webinar, Australia's leading customer service expert Jacquie Scammell provides some tips and insight into how to create a winning CX culture in your business. “How can we get our Agents to be more productive?” they ask. 200 per day sounds near impossible unless each call averages 2.25 minutes and you take exactly 30 minutes of break and 30 minutes of lunch in a typical 8.5 hour … As the agent can’t control the fact no calls are being offered to them, the available time is subtracted from their overall time. Popular categories include: How to improve employee engagement, tips for contact centre managers, tips for call centre Team Leaders, tips for frontline call centre agents, articles for CX executives,  how to improve the customer experience, how to improve call centre performance, KPIs & Metrics and whole lot more! The focus you want for your frontline staff is to focus on the conversation, not a stopwatch. Let’s take two call centre employees: The first agent works the day shift (which is super busy) and they normally average 10 calls per hour The second agent works the night shift (which is pretty quiet) and … You’re well on the way to enhancing Agent and Customer Experience. Send us your email, we will make sure you never miss a thing! These employees are getting 400 calls and each one takes an average of three minutes to handle – 2 minutes of … If each person handles 10 calls an hour, how many people are needed to handle calls during these hours? Like to access all our premium content for free? Usually when we hear people talk about productivity they have their finger pointed firmly at their Agents. Some Real-Life Examples 100 Calls Per Day. In our agent 2 example, as we mentioned the night shift is very quiet. One measure is targeted calls per hour (C/H). Why are you still talking about Average Handling Time? Like to access all our premium content for free? This target is by the call center calculator for the Lines calculation. Provide agents with access to real-time metrics. And if we don’t give Quality – then what we’re doing is pointless. The best Contact Centres don’t target Agents individually on the quantity of contacts handled (for Service Level based contacts – that caveat must always be there). Of these calls, 75% occur between 9:30 a.m. and 3:30 p.m., and calls are evenly distributed during this time. 0.01 mean 1 call blocked per 100 calls attempted). For Centres that have sorted this out and no longer target Agents on quantity handled – congratulations. The important part here is the wait time (also known as Available Time). We’d better go taste her pizza to ensure quality hasn’t been compromised. Just looking at the average of 10 calls per hour result we could say both employees have the same performance levels. Here are some popular outbound call center metrics and an explanation about why they are good to monitor: For purposes of this article let’s assume that they discovered that a pizza chef operating at the rate of 22 – 25 pizzas per hour was ideal. CC-Excel introduces nine Erlang call center functions to Excel for estimating call … There is first call resolution), percentage of calls blocked, average call abandonment rate, average call length, total calls handled,cost per call (CPC) and many more. But this is where the Calls Per Hour metric comes into play. The list of critical metrics that contact center … To set up an in-house call center… But that logic was inherently flawed for a number of reasons, least of which was the complete lack of focus on quality metrics. It fosters quantity rather than quality. … The average salary for a call center employee is $27,834. We can help. Abandoned After ThresholdA key performance indicator (KPI) measuring number of calls disconnected after waiting in queue beyond a previously established time threshold. Simply click, Notice that none of these learnings had to do with targeting individual Agent calls handled, What Conway Twitty taught me about Agent resilience, Good & evil in Customer Experience and why it’s like a Marvel Comics movie, The Service Level set and its resulting Occupancy rate, The health of the Forecasting, Staffing, Scheduling & Real Time Management process at the interval level, The size of the Queue at any given time (known as the Pooling Principle), The undeniable mathematics of random contact arrival (which is why we have Erlang C), For Ireland/Germany/Singapore (name your market or city) we know that on a Saturday afternoon shift the right rate of call handling that delivers on quality is about 12 – 15 calls per hour, Our night shift Team calls per hour achievement will always be lower than our day shift Team calls per hour achievement, The true calls per hour rate for Japan will always be lower than our calls per hour rate for IndiaWe know that if we see variations in the rate we need to explore the underlying reasons (conduct root cause analysis) and not just blame Agents or push them to go faster. We don’t (or won’t) target Agents on Quantity Handled for Service level based contacts. What we don’t know in this exercise (at least so far) is the appropriate or best rate at which we should be making pizzas. The Dials per Hour metric gives a view into how productive your call team is, and how many customers or leads are being contacted on average every business-operating hour. Typically at this point in the discussion the topic of Quality comes into the picture. I think that there are some big flaws in using calls per hour as the key metric. Subscribe to our monthly newsletter >, CX Directory – Search over 300 suppliers of contact centre and customer experience products and services, CX Skills – public and private training solutions for call centres & CX, CX Consult – our consulting services for call centres and customer experience. The formula for the Calls Per Hour metric is: (calls handled) / (login time – wait time). In other words if her Occupancy rate had been 100% this is how many she would have made. But much like AHT,  CPH is not a good metric for frontline agents. Once you normalize the data as you see above, we can calculate the ‘rate’ at which both of these people are working. Very specialized, high level agencies in these countries can occasionally be hired for $35-$50 … Total number of dials within the reporting period/Total number of active hours … Adherence & Shrinkage. CX Central is part of CX GROUP AUSTRALIA and our other websites include CX Skills, CX Consult and CX Connect. 5. Formula. Industry Standard – 80% of calls answered in 20 seconds. But when they want to conduct comparative quantity analyses they use the same normalization technique we used in this story for pizzas. See if you can answer the question posed in the picture below for our fictional Pizza Palace company. Cost per Contact (CoC) Calculation: ACD Calls per hour / Agent's hourly rate. Search the Industry Business Directory to find suppliers and vendors of call centre technology, consultants, outsourcers & BPO’s and lots more more. Scaling the team from 21 to 24 agents, for example, eliminates more than half of delayed calls … But we can’t possibly hold Prachi or Sangeetha accountable for how busy (or not) their outlets were – they’re not in the Sales & Marketing Team. 5. Calls Answered Per Hour. For example, best practices stipulate that 80% of incoming calls … The Erlang C predictions in this chart, based on a 20-hour workload, show how slight variations in front-line call center staffing totals can dramatically impact service quality. It is important to measure versus calls where immediate customer hang-ups do not reflect an adequate opportunity for performance.Abandoned Before ThresholdA key performance indicator (KPI) measuring number of calls disconnected before reaching a previously established time threshold.Abandoned CallA phone call that … When we ask “What do you mean by productivity?” the most common answer is –, “How can we get the Agents to handle more calls or live chats per hour (day/week)?”. In this article I share how to use the True Calls per Hour calculation in the Contact Centre. Now that we have a viable quality range to look at, we can draw some conclusions about the pizza chefs in this story. Determining Call Center Staff Requirements Now it’s time to staff for the call center. We get into a bit of advanced operations here. So let’s see who is more productive using the CPH formula: As you can see above, the second agent is actually more productive with 25.00 CPH. The combined impact of these two actions reduced the annual contact volume per customer from 1.26 calls per year to 1.14 calls per year. An entry-level call center may include four representatives. Adherence is defined as how closely an agent adheres to their schedule. Productivity in a Contact Centre is not about how many calls or chats are handled. Excel version. If you seek to compare the rate of contact handling for different times of day, for different shifts, for different cities or countries or across a time period – an educated implementation and use of True Calls per Hour calculation can help. Maximizing Contact Center … In order to correctly compare both Prachi and Sangeetha, you take what they actually ‘did’ (in this case how many pizzas they made) and divide that by the Occupancy rate they experienced during that time. Again, the idea behind the CPH metric is you remove the component the agent can’t control which is the time logged in when no calls are coming through. So we can now compare both of our pizza chefs on the same basis because we have factored out the impact of the different Occupancy rates. For now, we’ll put the quality issue to one side and focus purely on the assumption that the more calls an agent takes the better. In some accounts I averaged around 40-50 at about 3-5 minutes per with occasional slow times, in others I averaged about 10-20 maybe depending on the day and call type and what part of the account I was working in. There are very real mathematical realities at work that put the number of calls or chats handled outside the direct control of the Agent. For inbound call centers, the process of staffing involves establishing a traffic model that considers the number of expected calls per hour and service level targets to determine how many staff members are … Call centre managers are always looking for ways to measure the performance of contact centre agents and traditionally that used to be based on the number of calls an agent answers in a shift or per hour. If your contact center has multiple agents with varying hourly rates then this calculation should be taken across the entire call center or for each group, depending on how your call center … What we don’t know (or haven’t figured out) yet. Answering a specified percentage of calls in a set number of seconds and percentage of abandoned calls … But for planning, comparative and high level management purposes is there some way we can analyze the quantity handled across different shifts, cities and even countries? When I teach this in workshops, I like to use the example of making pizzas in a Pizza outlet. For example, even the most determined and hard-working SDR who makes 100 calls a day may be uncovering too few real opportunities. It’s pretty clear why this is important: if customers aren’t satisfied with your … On the other hand, Sangeetha is operating outside of the range – and on the high side. The traditional service … Blocking target: the ratio of calls that fail through insufficient lines (e.g. In a real-life case, I had the opportunity to work with a tenacious and disciplined person who made 100 calls per … Learn more about the True Calls Per Hour metric, How to measure a call centre agents performance, The ten most popular call centre metrics explained, Find out more about our courses for emerging and existing contact centre managers >, The Heart and Mind of a Winning CX Culture, Intelligent Automation for the Contact Centre, Tips for improving customer support delivery, How to Convert Customer Frustration Into Acquisition, Why you should forget the 2017 customer experience trends, Error Tolerance: The new wave in Customer Experience, 4 Simple Steps for Building and Sustaining Team Momentum, How to improve giving feedback to employees, 4 Quick Outbound Calling Tips Team Leaders Should Coach, Getting past gatekeepers when cold calling, a comprehensive CX & call centre glossary, The first agent works the day shift (which is super busy) and they normally average 10 calls per hour, The second agent works the night shift (which is pretty quiet) and also averages 10 calls per hour. For example it says that 100 bad calls are better than 70 average calls and 50 excellent calls. Calls per hour is, in my view, a bit dangerous as a key performance indicator, because it could drive people to speed through calls and thus compromise service to the customer, or do worse things such as answer a call and hang up without saying anything - thus pegging a call … The primary keys to performance in a call center are training and motivation. But we should still taste her pizza now and then for quality assurance purposes. The challenge with this concept, of course, is that a contact centre agent can’t control the number of calls that are presented to them. Fast food companies are well known for conducting very scientific time & motion studies on how many can be ‘done’ and still deliver the required level of quality. CX Central helps support and provide advocacy for Australian call centres, BPOs & CX practitioners. This 3-day course is designed to teach you the foundations of good Workforce Management principles (WFM), and how to implement them in your own business. CX Connect – Our free service that connects you directly to suppliers that can meet your specific requirements. We’ll never run a sustainable pizza business. It is very likely that Pizza Palace has conducted in depth time and motion studies. The required quality standards were achieved without any obvious pick up or loss in productivity. Understanding how many calls your agents answer per hour is a good measure of productivity. Prachi is probably ‘doing fine’. Decide the number of calls … ), departmental policies and procedures, and the kind of equipment/systems you work with, how many calls per hour … When you stop and look at it, the key factors that drive contact quantity up or down per Agent include: What you need to know about the Pooling Principle in Contact Centers. Based on the size of your jurisdiction, the kinds of calls you are taking (all 9-1-1 and non-emergency calls, fire only, EMD only, etc. 1. Customer satisfaction. Sure, it’s important to make sure your contact centre agents are productive, but my suggestion is that metrics that measure the quantity of the agent’s output like Calls Per Hour are better suited to Team Leaders/Centre Managers. Average Time in Queue. Got it. You have successfully subscribed to the Newsletter, How to use the True Calls per Hour Calculation in the Contact Centre, Considering taking the Certified Customer Experience Professional exam? The Calls Per Hour metric is very similar to the True Calls Per Hour metric and to explain, I’ve got an example below. One customer service representative can service on average µ calls per hour. The concept of a call center can be a simple operator than transfer scenario which usually involves about 2-3 people industry standard for calls … How good (or not) the pizza looks & tastes. Ok Dan (you might say). Sangeetha is working at the rate/speed of 28.3 pizzas per hour. Because we want Customers to come back again. Some of the conclusions I’ve seen Clients come up with using this technqiue include: Notice that none of these learnings had to do with targeting individual Agent calls handled. Copyright © 2020 | CX Group Australia | Phone: +61 3 98007 7287, We have hundreds of expert articles and free tools like an. This measure – when directed at Service Level based contacts – has always been problematic. Average time in queue refers to your customer’s wait time before they reach … That’s how the True Calls per Hour calculation works. In other words if her Occupancy rate had been 100% this is how many she would have made. Finally, call centers in mature western countries (like the US, UK, Germany & Canada) typically charge $22-$32. What makes this difficult to answer is that our Delhi outlet is busier than our Chennai outlet. On this CX Central Podcast we talk to Brad Shaw, Managing Director of livepro to learn all about Knowledge Management in contact centres. In fact, it’s so quiet they spent 20 minutes out of every 60 minutes just sitting there waiting for a call to come through. She’s operating at the upper end of the range and is within range. Agents that have access to real-time information like how many callers are in the queue, the status of other agents, longest waiting time in the queue, average abandonment time and average waiting time can better adapt to the call center… The metrics, however, are the determining factors of success. The Provider’s Performance An investment in call center outsourcing can be squandered if the provider you choose isn’t able to perform up to industry standards. The December 2020 Customer service emails training course is designed to equip frontline correspondence Team Members and their direct Team Managers with the knowledge and skills needed to effectively (with style) and efficiently (with a focus on reducing unnecessary repeat contacts) better manage complaints and enquiries received via emails. A Customer Telephone Center receives 1,200 calls in a 24-hour period. Service that connects you directly to suppliers that can meet your specific Requirements in the discussion topic! & tastes the other hand, sangeetha is operating outside of the agent their finger pointed firmly at their.. Wait time ) at this point in the Contact Centre leaders should know and be able use... Average µ calls per hour center staff Requirements now it ’ s how True... Is: ( calls handled ) / ( login time – wait time ) or ’. And hard-working SDR who makes 100 calls attempted ) still talking about average Handling?. 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