As the customer service call center has become the most vital interface between a company and its customers, it has become critical that the contact handling process be conducted both effectively and efficiently.
Many companies now want a "third party" opinion regarding how well their call center is functioning in its strategic role of getting, keeping, and growing customers. This business need to rate the performance of a company's mission critical call center has lead executives to recognize the potential of the contact center as a significant revenue generator, perhaps one of the surest investments they can make in enhancing and creating customer value and bottom-line profits.
The Purdue / BenchmarkPortal warehouse of contact center data, now in its second decade, has the following unique attributes:
- It is a unique source for real-time best practice performance measures;
- It is continually updated with fresh contact center data via one or more of the update methods mentioned below;
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Performance is compared to a Peer Group with similar functional characteristics (apples to apples) defined by you, the participant; and - 12 KPI Benchmarking Survey - RealityCheck™ - This is an 11 point questionnaire available online at the benchmarkportal.com website, and is the easiest method contact center managers can use to generate a report containing a comparison of their key performance metrics benchmarked against the best practices KPI's of their chosen industry. The RealityCheck™ Report compares the performance gaps of your KPI's to show where the contact center is performing well as well as which areas improvements can be made. Our database allows us to provide accurate ROI analysis estimated savings that can be achieved by improving certain metrics. The report is free if you schedule a read out with a CCDQ Certified Call Center Auditor.
- Is an extended format of RealityCheck that covers over 60 data points;
- Enables managers to target areas of opportunity within the center;
- Identifies the efficiency and effectiveness of your Call Center performance; and
- One-Minute Surveys™ - Since 2000, BenchmarkPortal has conducted hundreds of online One-Minute Surveys™ of contact center managers and executives. The information gathered by these surveys has also been added to the database, bringing an additional level of richness and freshness to our database resource
- The process is based strictly on a quantitative approach, as compared to a qualitative approach where most performance issues depend upon the judgment of a trained auditor.
- We use a "balanced score-card" approach of performance comparison in which weighted KPI's from your center are compared to the industry selected for certification.
- Our certification is academically based, and uses only established scientific methods to measure the achievement of certifiable best practices standards
- KPI data collected during the certification process is added to our database and is used to derive the best practice standards we publish in our reports.
Conclusion
Herein lies the challenge and the primary reason to benchmark your center’s performance metrics against your peer group, as well as centers representing best-in-class performance. Benchmarking your contact center performance against a Peer Group of similar centers is a mandatory step in becoming and staying competitive. This vital information, updated constantly, enables managers to remain competitive in a cost-effective manner by:
- Secondly, you can further magnify performance gaps by calculating the dollar value of poor performance. For instance, it is much less likely that you will get management's attention if you publish a performance gap in average talk time of 1.5 minutes per call. It is much more likely that you will get immediate management attention if you instead show that a performance gap of 1.5 minutes for each call compared to your peer group adds up to over a million dollars of excess cost each year.
