Benchmark study of inbound call center performance.

1. Call Center Strategies 2009
Improving Service Delivery
Assembling the right mix of resources to ensure high-quality, cost-effective customer care is a
constantly evolving challenge. Selecting, training, managing, and motivating a large pool of
employees requires creativity, enthusiasm, and perseverance. Determining the right
combination of technology and personal touch is also a moving target as customer needs and
expectations evolve. Many companies that have hit the mark have found it’s even more
challenging to stay on top.
With this in mind, the Ascent Group conducted its third annual call center benchmarking study
to better understand how companies are managing inbound customer care. We asked
companies to share their experiences to help us identify the practices that make or break a
customer contact center. We also asked companies to provide performance benchmarks so we
could identify “best performers”—companies providing the best service at the best cost. The
results of this research are contained in our report, Call Center Strategies 2009. This is the
Ascent Group’s third annual benchmarking study of inbound call centers.
Research topics included:
Call Center Benchmarking Comparisons by Industry
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First Call Resolution Performance
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Frontline Training Practices
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Supervisory Training
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Reward Recognition Approaches
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Monitoring Call Quality
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IVR Performance
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Call Center Benchmark Performance
We asked companies to report call center operational data so we could calculate several
performance benchmarks. The following benchmark metrics were collected and calculated,
based on participant feedback:
Unit cost (cost per call – Operational Maintenance costs only – direct labor,
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contractor costs, overtime, and non-labor OM; no capital costs or overheads)
% Abandoned calls (total calls handled versus total calls offered)
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% Call resolved on first contact (of total calls handled)
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Calls handled per FTE (per month)
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% Agent availability (time on phone or available to take calls)
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Service Level conformance (percent of days service level goals achieved)
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©2009 The Ascent Group, Inc. 1

2. Average Speed of Answer (Time delay between the first ring heard by the caller and
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when the call is answered by an agent or automated system (IVR or VRU). If the caller
waits in a queue prior to being handled by the agent, include all time spent in the queue
in the ASA.)
Once we identified the “best performers” for each industry-—above average companies that
deliver low cost, high productivity, and high service—we calculated a “best performer” average
for these high performing companies. The following two charts depict the Unit Cost and
Abandonment Rate for our study group compared to our “best performer” average.
More benchmark performance comparisons are presented in the published research report,
Call Center Strategies 2009.
What Did We Learn?
“Best Performing” contact centers are more likely to:
Use behavioral-based screening to select the best candidates,
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Empower employees to make decisions,
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Actively reward and praise employees for superior performance,
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Commit resources to consistently monitor call quality and provide feedback,
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Offer periodic refresher training,
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Actively measure and monitor performance, and
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Use performance results to drive continual improvement.
•
©2009 The Ascent Group, Inc. 2

3. Hire the right people.
The best foundation for service excellence is your frontline, however many companies have
struggled finding the right people due to out-dated recruitment and hiring practices. Our
research shows that most companies rely on age-old interviewing techniques to identify
qualified candidates rather than behavior-based interviewing techniques or even basic customer
service skills testing. As a result, companies struggle to deliver consistent customer-oriented
service.
Best-in-Class companies look for motivated and enthusiastic people who demonstrate a
propensity to serve. It is easier to teach proficiency than it is to change attitudes. Hire for
attitude and train the technical; emphasize potential over experience. Best-in-Class companies
have turned hiring into an art form, not only the process but also the identification of the right
type of employee.
Use behavioral-based assessment tools and
interviewing techniques to pick the candidates with
the personality and attitudes for the job. In a service
business, the employees are the company and hiring
is critical. Work to strengthen your recruitment
process so you start with the right people. Use a
series of interviews, peer interviews, group
interviews, phone interviews, role-playing and
simulation to better understand how candidates
react and perform under different scenarios and
pressure. Do as much as you can to determine if the
candidate is a good fit for the job, the work group,
and the organization, before you make the offer.
At the same time, it is important to adequately communicate job expectations to candidates as
well as better understand candidate expectations. The more a candidate understands about the
job, the work environment, performance expectations, and culture, the better the fit. Use job
shadowing, peer interviews, or simulation to relay culture and expectations. Rewrite job ads so
the appropriate expectations are conveyed. Survey new hires to better understand how to
continually refine the process and minimize new-hire surprise.
Emphasize the Importance of the Customer Experience in the recruiting process—make sure
that candidates know up front about your organizational commitment to customer service.
Stress the importance of customer service and customer satisfaction in the job advertisements,
on your hiring web pages, and during interviews. Rewrite job descriptions to emphasize
customers’ service expectations.
Recruit for the Position and the Schedule—Your organization may use a combination of part-
time, temporary, and full-time labor. Be sure to recruit for each type of labor separately as the
schedule might dictate a different pool of interested candidates. For instance, companies relying
predominantly on part-time labor have found a ready pool of qualified candidates in retirees,
stay-at-home moms, and college students, who prefer a part-time schedule. Be sure your
recruitment efforts target each group differently, using the most appropriate means for that
©2009 The Ascent Group, Inc. 3

4. group. Also consider generational differences. For instance, to attract Generation Y candidates,
consider advertising at Internet cafes, public libraries, skateboard parks, and the Internet. Just
make sure your targeting the right audience with the right message using the right channel.
Employee referrals are an excellent source of qualified and potentially loyal candidates. By
tapping into them as a source for open positions, organizations achieve greater loyalty, lower
turnover, improved productivity and profits. Rewarding successful referrals can further
stimulate employees to use word-of-mouth advertising to attract qualified candidates.
People Matter.
Engaged employees are the key to excellent customer service. Engaged employees are
employees that feel as though they are truly valued at work; that their efforts directly
contribute towards the mission and success of the company. Engaged employees are more
productive and less likely to look outside of the company for employment.
The best approach for a call center depends upon its unique composition. A lot depends upon
the demographics of the group—generational, cultural, and individual differences. Call centers
with college-age employees have different priorities from ones made up primarily of mothers
with school-age children. In more competitive environments, paying bonuses for perfect
attendance may be more successful than increasing the base salary. You have to evaluate your
own unique environment to find out what will work best.
We’ve seen a growth in more interactive, hands-on training opportunities for new hires—role-
playing, simulation, and peer mentoring. Hands-on experiences help internalize learning,
incorporate more “learning by doing” opportunities into your new-hire program. Hands-on
learning can also be used to drive assessment so that trainers can measure both factual
knowledge and comprehension. Additionally, training comprehension is increased through
individualized training—training tailored to each students individual learning style. Smaller class
sizes, modular training, and self-paced activities help students learn at their own pace.
The more a new employee understands about the job, the work environment, performance
expectations, and culture, the quicker they will be able to achieve standard. Use job shadowing,
peer mentoring, or simulation to relay culture and expectations. Revise training content so the
appropriate expectations are conveyed. Survey new students to better understand how to
continually refine the process and minimize new-hire surprise.
In this age of changing technologies, industry restructuring, and competitive markets, call center
training is one of the call center manager’s most vital resources. As customer service, more
specifically the call center, becomes a strategic weapon in the competitive marketplace,
management must be sure that their front-line is prepared to deliver the most effective and
responsive level of service possible.
Invest in your front-line—provide them with the tools, authority, and training to get the job
done right the first time. Help them view service from the customer perspective so they can
determine how best to serve the customer. Often times, low first call resolution performance
is a result of under-trained or unsupported agents—they don’t have the skills or information
they need to resolve the request or problem.
©2009 The Ascent Group, Inc. 4

5. Recognize the right behaviors and communicate such that the employee’s behavior becomes a
model within the work group. Sharing information on expected behaviors and rewards will
establish trust. Employees will be able to understand what they need to do to be similarly
recognized. Reward these behaviors so other employees are inclined to follow suit. Rewards
are a better reinforcement of learning and risk-taking than punishment is for failure.
Recognition is about acknowledgement and appreciation for a contribution, improvement,
innovation, or excellence—a message to employees that they are valued. The act of recognizing
an employee affirms the values and spirit underlying the achievement. It’s also about reinforcing
desired behaviors and increasing their occurrence. Attitude and performance are closely linked;
the appropriate recognition at the appropriate moment will create a positive attitude that, in
turn, will lead to improved performance.
Do your homework. Talk to employees at all levels, in all job categories, to understand
expectations and drivers of performance. Identify meaningful rewards for each employee.
Focus on the Customer Experience.
Find out what your customers expect from your company and your employees. Conduct
regular customer research to understand expectations and measure customer satisfaction
routinely, and if possible, tie customer satisfaction feedback to individual employees. This will
hold your front-line employees accountable for their service delivery. Measure Customer
Satisfaction with your services and service delivery. Only 45 percent of our panel routinely
measures customer satisfaction. Companies that do not measure customer satisfaction and
customer expectations are missing out on business-essential feedback.
Emphasize the importance of Customer
Service in the performance management
process—Make sure that front-line employees,
supervisors, and managers know about your
organizational commitment to customer
service. Stress the importance of customer
service and customer satisfaction throughout
the new hire training program and supplement
with ongoing refresher training. Do as much as
possible to integrate the “Customer
Experience” into daily operations—so
employees understand customer expectations
and appreciate the customer perspective.
Structure incentives, rewards, and recognition
initiatives around metrics that approximate the
correct customer experience.
Research from prior Ascent Group IVR
Benchmarking studies confirmed that “best-in-
class” companies conduct extensive customer research in conjunction with any IVR design
changes or additions. Best performers use customer focus groups and other research methods
to establish customer expectations and the demand for self-service options—to test design
prototypes, validate scripting and prompts, and confirm menu options. Not just once, but over
©2009 The Ascent Group, Inc. 5

6. and over—every time a change or enhancement is considered. IVR applications are fluid
systems and customer expectations are ever changing. Make sure you have the ability to
continually monitor customer needs so you can meet expectations.
Measurement techniques must also be reflective of customers’ values and expectations. Try to
view first call resolution from the customer perspective. Know what your customers’ expect
and respond accordingly. Do everything you can to make sure your customers’ questions and
concerns are resolved promptly and accurately. Conduct focus groups, customer needs
assessments, and other surveys to gather the feedback necessary to understand expectations
and performance. Do not assume you know what your customers want.
Make Time.
Many companies have a difficult time balancing the day-to-day needs of the business and the
need to train and develop frontline employees. Make the time to adequately train and prepare
your frontline customer service resources. Make sure they are equipped and trained to handle
all situations. Refresh training periodically to keep employees in top performance and up-to-
date on customer service and technical skills.
Commit the resources to adequately monitor, evaluation, and discuss results. Effective call
monitoring is all about commitment of resources. If providing regular, fair, and timely feedback
is a challenge for your organization or if your supervisors are always pressed for time, consider
setting up an in-house quality assurance group. There are also outsourcing options available—
companies that specialize in agent behavior analysis. Contracted monitoring services can be
provided on-site or remotely, based on your specifications and standards.
Recognize behavior and reward results in a timely manner so that employees know exactly why
they are being recognized. Be specific, clear, and communicate so that others will take notice.
Consistency is Key.
Organizations reporting more highly
engaged workers actively promote a
culture of engagement by ensuring that
organizational leaders, including immediate
supervisors, are skilled in the area of
engagement improvement. After all, having
a good relationship between employees
and immediate supervisors is a top driver
of employee engagement. Yet, many
frontline supervisors are lacking in basic
supervisory skills, much less tactics for
engaging employees.
Many customer service organizations have
not taken the time to establish a formal
supervisory (coach) training program. As a result, employee development, performance and
morale suffers. Our research shows that 60 percent of participants expressed no process for
training coaches or supervisors. Of those reporting a coach or supervisor training process,
©2009 The Ascent Group, Inc. 6

7. most rely on internal training resources to provide formal coaching or leadership training.
Others rely on management-led training, peer training, webinars, or outside training.
Call monitoring is inarguably one of the best methods of improving call quality and service
delivery. While companies can measure customer satisfaction through customer focus groups,
customer contact follow-up telephone surveys, and written satisfaction surveys, the results are
often not timely enough or detailed enough to help individual agents understand their impact or
contribution. A call monitoring session on the other hand, if done correctly, can instantly
deliver a wealth of customer satisfaction information, gauge individual agent performance and
reveal a lot about your business processes and policies. However, only half of our participants
monitor call quality, and monitoring quality of email, letters, faxes, video, and chat is much less
practiced. Only 26 percent of participants monitor email quality and 11 percent monitor
correspondence quality.
Call quality calibration is essential to ensure consistency and build confidence in call monitoring
results. However our research shows that many contact center organizations are not
calibrating on a regular basis or calibrating at all. The best way to gain consensus on a call is to
design the proper review criteria and then test it over and over. These new systems facilitate
this process by streamlining the selection, capture, and presentation of calls and data. Group
discussions comparing and discussing results help to focus and clarify the not so easy task of
judging performance, and they also build confidence and consistency.
To ensure successful continuous improvement, encourage your training group to work closely
with your quality assurance and operational excellence groups. This will encourage the link
between learning and performance—making sure the training group is equipping employees to
successfully perform as well as making sure any operational changes are reflected in training. At
the same time, underperforming employees can receive targeted training.
©2009 The Ascent Group, Inc. 7

8. Get it Right the First Time.
First Call Resolution is perhaps the most powerful call center metric. A focus and improvement
in FCR brings the best of both worlds—an improvement in efficiency and effectiveness. You
don’t have to worry that you are sacrificing quality because you are reducing costs, or vice
versa. When you improve FCR you’re improving quality, reducing costs, and improving
customer satisfaction, all at the same time.
Less than a third of our panel measures FCR performance. Institute a program to measure,
track, and manage FCR performance. It’s a key driver of continuous improvement and a key
determinant of customer satisfaction. If you don’t measure it you can’t improve!
Our research identified four primary ways of measuring First Call Resolution—customer
surveying and three other approaches that deliver internal approximations of First Call
Resolution. While each approach has its uses, ultimately, the customer’s evaluation of issue or
contact resolution is what matters most. Make sure you ask your customers how well their
issues and concerns were resolved.
Measure Your Performance.
A family of these measures should be selected to accurately measure performance. Establish
goals and objectives for your organization based on defined missions, end products, and
activities. Identify key result areas where results must be achieved if goals are to be obtained
(Critical Success Factors). In most organizations there are usually three to six factors that
determine success. Consider outcome as well as output. The key to any good performance
measurement system is how well it represents the service objectives (CSFs) and how well
those objectives have been defined.
Do as much as possible to relay performance expectations to employees. The more an
employee understands about the job, the work environment, performance expectations, and
©2009 The Ascent Group, Inc. 8

9. culture, the better they will be able to achieve or exceed standard. Revise training content so
the appropriate expectations are conveyed. Communicate performance routinely and look for
ways to make your performance results more accessible to employees and supervisors.
Online performance measurement tools and dashboards improve communications of
performance results to front-line employees. It also can make this information accessible when
supervisors are unavailable. Online, browser-based graphical comparisons make it easy for
employees, supervisors, and management to gauge performance. Make sure your performance
metric framework is balanced—considers efficiency and effectiveness—and accurately measures
the customer experience.
If possible, include agent FCR and Call
Quality performance as a component in
the annual review process—as a basis for
compensation and rewards. Surprisingly,
only 75 percent of participants have
factored call quality monitoring results
into agent performance. Be careful to
balance with other measures to make sure
all around good performance is delivered
and service isn’t compromised—that
agents know when to escalate a call or
assign it to further investigation. Also
make sure your evaluation criteria are
flexible enough that agents can make the
right decisions for each caller.
Create a performance measurement framework so you can measure the impact of your reward
and recognition program. Track the performance metrics that form the basis of your reward
structure and conduct surveys to gain qualitative feedback from employees and supervisors.
Build your IVR applications so that it’s easy to dissect applications and track call flow, errors,
voluntary and involuntary opt-outs and opt-out points, hang-ups, and success rates. Make sure
that you can track the caller’s outcome—measure performance from the customer’s
perspective—how it impacted what he or she was trying to accomplish.
Take advantage of a service or tool to actively test and monitor your IVR applications. These
services can point out application, network, and system inefficiencies and failures that you may
not recognize or hear about from customers. These tools can also track transactions, system
availability, and system reliability, and even test your applications under varying degrees of
stress and at varying times of the day, week, month, and year.
Comparing your company’s call center performance against a representative peer group can
provide tremendous benefits. Not only can you learn more about how your peers approach
similar work tasks, you often learn more about your own organization simply by participating in
the measurement process. You may confirm what management already knows as well as
confirm the belief that there really is a need to change. It may provide the “proof” that
management has been struggling to uncover. When conducted properly, employees actively
participate in the process and become part of the solution.
©2009 The Ascent Group, Inc. 9

10. About The Ascent Group, Inc.
The Ascent Group, Inc. is a management-consulting firm that specializes in customer service
operations and improvement, performance benchmarking, competitive benchmarking, work
management, and industry research.
Research reports published by the Ascent Group include:
• Call Quality Practices
• Credit Collection Practices
• Achieving First Call Resolution
• IVR Improvement Strategies
• Reward Recognition Program Profiles Best Practices
• Improving Frontline People Processes: Recruitment, Training Performance
• Billing and Payment Profiles Best Practices
• Meter Reading Profiles Best Practices
• Call Center Strategies
• Improving Field Services
These research reports can be purchased online, through our secure order form at
www.ascentgroup.com or by phone at (888) 749-0001.
The Ascent Group offers many opportunities for your company to participate in benchmarking
and best practice discovery through its online benchmarking services:
Call Center Operations
•
First Call Resolution
•
Call Quality Monitoring
•
IVR Technology
•
Field Services
•
Credit Collection
•
Billing Payment Services
•
Remittance Processing
•
Field Services
•
Meter Reading
•
Frontline Recruitment, Training
•
Reward Recognition Program
•
The Ascent Group is currently researching First Call Resolution. If you are interested in
participating in our research, please contact Christine Kozlosky at ckk@ascentgroup.com or
(888) 749-0001.
The Ascent Group, Inc.
120 River Oak Way
Athens, GA 30605
(888) 749-0001
www.ascentgroup.com
©2009 The Ascent Group, Inc. 10