How can you improve your call center utilization. Call Centers – or Contact Centers as they are often called – are complex environments. For the call center manager, it is a challenge to operate the call center organization both efficiently and effectively. In this blog, we will explain how our Login Manager for IP telephones substantially decreases the overall login time of your call center staff. Or click the button to download the free trial:
In order to keep track of how well (or poor) a call center operates, multiple metrics can be used. Some of them have to do with the quality of the calls being handled by the agents. But also the operational efficiency is most of the time very important. One can imagine that in call centers with tens or hundreds of call center agents, losing time in handling calls can mean the difference between a profitable business or losing money.
Different metrics are available to measure the quality of call center operations. Although they may not be entirely objective, metrics like Quality Scores or Customer Satisfaction levels give an indication of the quality of the call agent’s work. More quantitative is the First Call Resolution (FCR) or Best Contact Resolution. These metrics show the percentage of calls that are ‘first time right’, so the customer doesn’t have to call back. There are multiple ways of measuring this. It can be measured in a qualitative way (checking the answers by monitoring calls) or in quantitative ways. For example, multiple calls from the same calling party number in a given timeframe indicate that the problem may not be solved.
Other call center metrics are more about the efficiency of the call center operations. The most popular one is perhaps the Average Handling Time (AHT). This is the total amount of time needed to handle a customer call. Including the talk time of course, but also the time a call agent is ‘off-line’ to search for an answer or a resolution (on-hold time) or the wrap-up after the call.
One metric is about the call center agent utilization, also known as occupancy. This is the percentage of time that the agent really can do call related work. This percentage is influenced by the amount of time he or she needs for other activities. And, in a call center environment, the time to log in to the call center systems may have a severe impact on that percentage.
We learned from our customers that this login and logout time may be substantial in call center environments. Sometimes staff has to login subsequently at a variety of desktop applications. Single Sign On (SSO) is of course a solution for this, but still we have reports about SSO not fully deployed yet.
And certainly for one specific – but crucial – element in call centers we often hear that there is no single sign on available. If telephone equipment is used with Extension Mobility – which means that someone has to log in – this login procedure may be cumbersome and time-consuming. As such, logging into Extension Mobility directly impacts the call center utilization metrics.
There are solutions like One Button login. From a call center efficiency perspective these are quite understandable. Specifically, with short shifts every extra minute of working time is pushing the efficiency metrics. But from a security point-of-view, it is far from recommendable, as we described earlier.
So, our Active Login Manager may be a solution for your call center operations. This software automates the login for IP telephones that use Extension Mobility. As such, it immediately decreases the overall login time of your call center staff and increases the utilization.
