Call centers are complicated facets of your business, with lots of moving pieces—and moving people. All too often, the overarching strategy and vision behind your call center gets lost in the shuffle.

But making sure your strategy is effectively achieving your goals is essential.

In this article, we’ll draw on our team’s decades of experience to show you how to measure the success of your call center strategy.

How To Develop a Call Center Strategy That’s Right For Your Business

It goes without saying that no two call center strategies should be exactly alike: instead, your strategy should reflect your organization’s unique needs, goals, roles, services, and so on.

A good call center strategy should include goals, initiatives and tactics for:

• maintaining and improving customer service levels
• growing your call center
• employee development
• supporting business growth
• management of your call center workflows and employees

With these details in place, you can turn to defining and measuring the success of these strategies and initiatives towards your overall goals.

Defining The Success of your Call Center Strategy

Before you can measure the success of your strategy, you need to know what exactly success looks like.

One of the most straightforward ways to define success for your call center is through Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). These key metrics should align with overall business goals, but some of the key ones many call centers track within their strategy include:

• CSAT (Customer Satisfaction)
• NPS (Net Promoter Score)
• FCR rate (First Contact Resolution rate)
• AHT (Average Handle Time)
• Average Time in Queue
• CLV (Customer Lifetime Value)

Once you’ve determined your overall business goals, your call center goals and KPIs should align with those and support them from a customer service and experience angle. Rather than being an offshoot of your business, a call center should act as an extension of your brand and business.

With that said, make sure you define success clearly for all areas of your call center strategy, not just operations or customer experience (although those are two big ones). KPIs can also be implemented to measure employee development, call center growth, management efficiency and more.

Tools and Techniques for Measuring The Success of your Call Center Strategy

Once you’ve defined KPIs for your call center, you now have hard metrics for whether or not your call center is succeeding and bringing you closer to your overall business goals. But how can you effectively and efficiently monitor, measure and analyze the data for these metrics to understand the success of your call center?

Use analytics and reporting tools. Having the right analytics and reporting tools in place—including real-time analytics—not only helps you make sense of your current operations, but also your success and growth as a call center. Keep in mind that the right analytics capabilities are just as important—if not more so—than the monitoring and reporting itself. After all, you don’t want to just understand what the numbers are, you want to understand what they mean, how they interact with each other, and what needs to improve.

Implement CSAT surveys. CSAT is an essential tool for measuring call center strategy because so many elements of call center success are reflected—or not—in CSAT. In short, measuring CSAT involves sending a short (typically just one question) survey asking customers to rate their experience, or satisfaction, with a recent customer service interaction. This creates quantitative data to measure the growing—or declining—customer satisfaction over time.

Leverage call monitoring and QA tools. Quality Assurance (QA) is essential for successful call center strategies—not only do call monitoring tools help you measure KPIs, but a robust QA process will help you ensure that metrics of quality and success are being upheld.

Challenges in Measuring Call Center Success

However, even with the right tools and techniques, measuring your call center’s success can still be challenging. Two of the biggest challenges we see call centers face include data overload and balancing qualitative and quantitative metrics. Here’s how you can avoid these challenges:

Overcoming data overload. Sometimes the problem isn’t not enough data, but too much data—or too much data without a way to make sense of it all. However, today’s modern tech provides ample opportunities for efficient data analysis. Using modern tech and AI capabilities can massively increase your capacity to monitor, measure and analyze data. In addition, as you’re scaling and growing your call center, be sure that you’re focused on getting useful insights from the existing data, not just increasing the amount of data you’re collecting.

Balancing quantitative and qualitative metrics. There’s no right or wrong proportion with these, the key is having a balance of each. Quantitative data may give you hard numbers for clear analysis, but qualitative data gives you much deeper insight into customer preferences, experiences and needs. In addition, ensure that you’re focusing on both operational data—such as FCR and AHT—alongside experiential data, such as CSAT. Using a mix of quantitative and qualitative metrics for both operational and experiential data will give you a much richer and deeper understanding of your call center success.

The Importance of Regular Performance Evaluation

As you evaluate and monitor the performance of your strategy, it’s critical to make performance evaluation an ongoing part of your workflow, and not a one-time or annual event. By measuring and evaluating your success, metrics, performance and quality on an ongoing basis, you can create a culture of continual improvement.

This is critical because improvement that happens too late may not be useful at all. After all, customer needs, preferences and expectations change rapidly in today’s environment—a strategy that’s working well six months ago may need modifications to continue working well today. As a result, you need to measure continually, as well as have processes in place to ensure that you’re implementing the results of your analysis. Ongoing evaluation also ensures that your strategy stays nimble, allowing you to adjust as needed to meet business goals and changing consumer desires.

Find The Right Call Center Partner

If you’re working with a call center, the most important part of your strategy begins before your call center even goes live—starting with finding the right call center partner. A good call center can ensure you determine the right strategy for your business goals, implement your strategy effectively, and are continually monitoring and evaluating your progress and success.

That said, finding the right call center is easier said than done. When evaluating call centers, ensure you carefully consider if they have:

• good testimonials or reviews from other clients
• case studies or use cases demonstrating the ability to get results
• compliance certifications ensuring security and quality
• experienced and well-trained agents
• expertise in customer service and customer experience
• best-in-class technology and omnichannel support

By creating an effective partnership from the outset, you can ensure a successful call center and make measuring—and achieving—success easier.

For a call center partner you can trust, turn to ROI CX Solutions. We’ve worked with clients across a variety of industries to create and implement call center strategies that drive results such as:

• improving customer satisfaction by over 15%
• generating over $22 billion in new revenue
• achieving a 70% inbound sales rate
• maintaining 90% service level averages
• and more!

To see how we can help transform your call center strategy, connect with an expert from ROI CX Solutions today!