How to Conduct a Call Center Performance Audit

Lately we’ve been talking about call center performance. After Andrew’s great post I thought I’d share another part of the performance metric, the audit.

If you’re looking at your call center and wondering if there is more money to be made, a way to lower your average speed of answer, increase customer quality satisfaction and keep billing your clients, then it’s time for a call center performance audit.

What is a call center performance audit?

A call center performance audit, or a call center audit is a series of measurements designed to show strengths and weaknesses in your call center business. This call center audit can tell you where and how you excel and where you fall behind. Before you begin tracking your call center performance you need to look at key factors that will come into play in the audit.

What should a successful call center look like?

A successful call center can be measured on an endless number of scores. Some of those scores are a waste of time, and some can help increase customer satisfaction and the bottom line.

1. Define customer satisfaction expectations.

1a. Surpass customer satisfaction expectations.

2. Keep and increase total number of customers.

3. Listen to the callers needs and tailor each call to meet those needs.

4. Define what your customers want and value.

4a. Go beyond simply what they value to make your service unbeatable.

If you’re taking those steps and tracking the results, you should see successful performance tracking over just a few weeks or months.

Will a call center audit help?

Absolutely! Why? Because when you find the areas in section 4 and 4a above, you’re ready to leapfrog your competition because of the valuable data you’ve mined from your audit. Here’s an example.

You have a small company that hires your call center to handle their call center overflow and to handle their answering service calls on the weekends. By asking questions of this client you find out that the office manager has tried hiring people locally to answer on the weekends and busy times during the week. They have also tried to outsource one other time to a New Mexico call center in the past, both had miserable results.

The reason they contacted you is that the office manager heard about offshore call centers at a conference she went to and found you by searching Google. Now unless you have asked the right questions to this office manager you’ll never know that she has already had a bad experience with a call center. Unless you ask, you won’t know what the problem was with the last call center. The goal of this conversation should be trying to figure out where the other contact center went wrong, and where you can go right by this particular customer. This comes down to customer service.

A call center audit will work in any of the following call centers:
Reservation Services Call Center
Technical Support Call Center
Dispatch Call Center

Answering Service Call Center
Appointment Scheduling Call Center
Fundraising Call Center

A call center audit will be effective whether you run an outbound or inbound call center.

Just about every type of call center will benefit from a call center audit. If you’ve never conducted a call center audit there are a few different books on the subject, but none better than The Executive Guide to Call Center Metrics.

If you have any questions about call center audits and metrics please leave a comment!

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