Call centre KPIs

[IDontLikeMondays88]

Can anyone who works in a call centre type environment tell me how seriously sticking to KPIs around call time / hold time is taken.

husband works in call centre but public sector. He is still on probationary period and keeps being told call times are too long. He seems to be gradually getting quicker but the ideal call times set seem to be very ambitious.

In my experience they care about your stats far more than if you actually help customers and resolve their issue/query.

If he's still fairly new and still getting the hang of things I'm not surprised his call times are above where management wants them to be. I'd expect it to go down as he gets more experience, though without knowing anything about what type of calls he receives its difficult to say whether the targets are realistic. I worked in a call centre for 14 years and while they did ideally want the handling time etc to be within targets, it only really became an issue if going over was a regular occurrence.

I agree with previous posters, common sense does not prevail when compared to stats. For example I worked in a call centre i wasn't shown how to do workflow so would take endless amount of calls, which often made me late on finishing, which I accepted. This particular evening no calls waiting and the centre closed in 4 mins so i took the opportunity to browse for new clothes online. Despite a shortage of managers, three noticed my online activity and presented themselves at the end of my desk! it was made clear that this was unacceptable despite me being ready for a call and waiting! No common sense!

They do take them seriously, in a proper call centre the resource management is planned in 5 minute increments, they will have stats forecasting exactly how many calls they expect to receive in every 5 minute increments period, how many people will be needed to answer those calls within the maximum allowed threshold for dial time, how many people they expect to be on toilet breaks, lunch breaks, in 1:1s, on holiday, on sick leave etc so that they can meet those targets. If it’s public sector then they may be working to strict SLAs with financial penalties, for example one I worked in had to answer 80% calls within 20 secs of the caller dialling and for every 0.5% below that SLA they had to pay a fine to the Govt client.

Like others say, they care about them to the exclusion of common sense.

Tell him to have a think about what is making him take "too long" (according to them) - is he still learning the systems and therefore a bit slow moving between screens? Is he having to put people on hold to ask questions or look things up? Is there any additional training or coaching that he thinks he would need to help with those things?

Hopefully he doesn't get too hard a time over it, especially if he is showing willing to improve

It depends on the call centre and to some extent whatever their current obsession is as they change focus, strategies and targets as often as we all change out underwear. But generally they can't see the wood for the trees and KPIs rule everything they do.

I was a call centre manager and the call time in probation was double what it was when you were a live agent. We would extend probation as long as we could and if someone showed promise but couldn't meet the target we would try to find an off the phones role for them, or outbound calling.

It's all about call volume. Not really customer resolution/satisfaction.
Presumably they have set phrases they are meant to say etc. I guess some calls will take longer but he just needs to watch others who hit targets and see if he can adopt some of their techniques.
He probably needs to get used to the ways in which they can hurry things along without failing to resolve the call.

So interestingly his feedback is that how he handles the customers is that he is providing really good customer service but they seem to be really focusing on the call length.
i think sometimes if he is not 100% sure as to what he is being asked or what to do next he is putting the customer on hold. I have said to him he needs to be more gung ho about it and not double check everything in this way - as he is being told the call times is the most important thing.
he is going to do some revision at the weekend and write up some notes for himself to refer to.
Think he will be good at handling people - has a nice manner with people but he is a double checking sort of person I just don’t think he has the time to do that.

It's a hard balancing act on giving good customer service and keeping the call time within KPIs. I once got a call marked down because I repeated something I had already said to a client and therefore in their mind wasted time. The client was 91 and I wanted to make sure she had remembered what I had said she needed to do. Unfortunately some people like myself can't squash their good customer service and common sense approach enough to meet the KPIs.

Yeah I am just a bit worried about it - I have this feeling they might extend lr

probation period

Even with nhs 111 they care a lot about call times. But at the beginning they are more concerned about you being safe than being quick on calls. But eventually they will put pressure on you.

It's going to be better for his KPIs to be accurate rather than quick. No one expects someone in their probation period to be as skilled at getting through calls as fast as people who have been there years.

He needs to say the right things to his team leader - like asking for advice on ways to get calls down, maybe ask if someone can sit with him and see if he's missing any short cuts. Being proactive about wanting to get the calls shorter looks good. Make sure he's keeping a log of every call that is escalating beyond reasonable time limits too, as a few of those can really affect the numbers.

He'll be flying through it in six months time, I bet you.

They are usually really strict about it and in fact would rather you provide worse customer service but meet the call time target, than provide amazing customer service and be on the phone for too long.

Ridiculous really as it’s absolutely better for the customer to have someone who takes their time & gives 100% but that isn’t the attitude of the management (micromanagers) in call centres, they’ll just let people go who mess up their call time stats rather than look at customer reviews.

Tbh he needs to get through them as quickly as possible. Don’t double check unless really not sure. Don’t make small talk. Don’t let the callers waffle.

It’s a shame that brevity is more important than quality but that’s the management decision and he needs to go along with it, their priorities are up to them.