Urgent benchmarks needed

[Jaydeep]

I would realy appreciate if someone could give me the benchmarks for the following in accordance with the industry standards.

First call resolution
Average speed of answer
Average talk time
Average wrap-up time
Abandon rates
Average number if IVR choices made per call
Cost per call and cost per resolution
Cost per minute


Throughput degradation of > 50%. Number of times in a year.

Regards
JM

[mikael]

Jay,

There is no such thing as "industry standards" for the metrics you have specified.

[JoeB]

Jay,

I agree with Mikael – there is no such standard, nor should there be one. Each business is vastly different in terms of domain, audience needs, skills and expectations, business strategies, and so forth. Any attempt to use so called “industry standards” is very risky. It is unfortunate that some popular bencahmrk databases and Websites do not emphasize the significant limitations in their data and teach their clients how to use them. I just returned from a series of lectures overseas in which I have demonstrated the flaws in relying on such data instead of doing your own analysis and use the other sources as interesting but possibly irrelevant data points.


Joe Barkai
www.DiagnosticStrategies.com
jbarkai@DiagnosticStrategies.com

[thetuan]

Jay,

Opinions on this subject will vary depending on your experience in call center management and the levels in which you managed. What I have found is that you will find consistency in your particular industry with the metrics that you have outlined. For example, CSR's call time in telecom customer service will be generally in the range of 3 minutes to 5 minutes and CSR's call time in directory assistance will be in the range of 25 seconds to 40 seconds. You will need to run a survey with call centers in your particular industry to see if such consistency exists and how you can use it. I want to caution you in relying solely on other call centers statistics because you are not familiar with their efficiencies in managing their centers. But if the centers in the same industry have similar efficiencies, then you WILL find very similar outputs with their key indicators.

I hope this helps and good luck.

Thanks

[teri99]

I strongly recommend reading Call Center Management on Fast Forward. It talks about the methodology/statistical logic and analysis.

Good reading!

[Sachin]

Hi jay,

Though I largely agree with the other forum members that there cannot be benchmarks for the metrics that you have specified.

However, a few of them do have industry benchmarks. The others are project specific. I can give you the benchmarks provided you detail me the nature of operations ( credit cards...collections...customer service...banking...insurance...concept sellind etc...)

Abandon rates for a customer service firms across the worls are benchmarked to 4 % and for other types to around 3%.

Average number of choices at the IVR including the security verification content is 4.

Average speed of answer is usually set to teh standards varying between 2 secs to 20 secs. This largely depends on the queuing of calls at the IVR as well and split skill routing mechanism.

First call resolution standards for best in class customer service operations is 92 %. But anything between 75-85 % is considered good. But agin this depends on the classification of the project.

Hope this helps for now.. Please do some detailing , following which I might help you take this further.

[JoeB]

Sachin,

When you compare call centers with identical business environment, customer base, internal structure and so forth, you will, of course, find that some of the metrics are similar. However, stating broadly that abandonment rates are 3-4% or that ASA is in the range of 2-20 seconds can be very misleading. Moreover, it may lead to call center managers trying to meet impossible/irrelevant performance goals instead of focusing on business-driven goals.

The following numbers are from one of the most referenced benchmark databases. The first number is the average; the second one is the best in class

80% calls answered in x (sec.): 36.7, 18.3
Average speed of answer (sec.): 34.6, 21.2
Average talk time (min.): 6.1, 3.3
Average wrap-up time (min.): 6.6, 2.8
Average calls abandoned: 5.5%, 3.7%
Average time in queue (sec.): 45.3, 28.1
Average first contact resolution: 70.5%, 86.8%
Cost per Call: $22, $3

It is apparent that the range is too big to be useful as a management tool. There is no way around having to analyze your own call center and determine the correct performance goals that correctly represent your core business values and your business objectives. I have worked with companies where ASA of 2 minutes was sufficient. I have worked with companies that view every abandoned call as a lost business transaction, so the objective was to reduce abandonment well below 4%Â…. Some of this perspective is described in these articles:

http://www.diagnosticstrategies.com/SL_elasticity.htm
http://www.diagnosticstrategies.com/abandonment.htm

Joe