Dealing with Metrics

Being in a call center is like being back to school. You are being measured by specific parameter and those parameters are geared towards the success of the campaign. It is oftentimes said that businessmen read by the figures and those figures are represented by metrics. There are metrics which are realistic in nature and there are those which is practically stupid! We will analyze each of those metrics and I assure you, your insecurity level will be on all time high!

                                                      

(1)          Attendance

Attendance is on top of the food chain for metrics in all call center. If a call center don’t put attendance as their number one priority, they are in for serious trouble. It is because attendance translates to money and money translates to profit. If the workforce is ever tardy, you will be out of business soon.

Attendance also speaks loud about the character of an agent. It shows discipline, commitment and competence.

But how does absenteeism translates to lost in profit? Let me smear into your face the brutal truth about it.

As an agent, you are being paid per hour. You will oftentimes hear, “You are paid per hour, you are not in a government office”.

Clients through workforce management is always signing up for a maximum number of seats in a call center. If a client signed up for 100 seats for a sixteen hour of operation, the call center should be able to deliver that service as stipulated in the contract otherwise the call center will be penalized or has to return the advance payment for that lost seat.

If you are an agent who is part of that 100 seats and you go on absent then the workforce is now down to 99. The call center has two option then, either they will return the money to the client at the end of the billing period or ask someone to cover your seat. In both ways, it is a lost in profit! How?

By asking someone to cover your seat means asking someone to extend or do overtime. By asking someone to extend or do overtime means that the call center has to pay additional 30% on top of the base pay of that agent requested to extend. So if there are 4 agents requested to extend for two hours each to cover the 8 hours shift that you didn’t attend to then the call center has to pay additional 30% to all those agents as legally mandated by law. Alternatively, the call center can keep the 99 workforce for the day and just return the balance to the client on their next billing period. That is a scenario that is least to happen! It is because in business, once the money is in, don’t let it out!

So, moral of the story here. If you are absent for a day with no valid reason, you are effectively stealing from the company! And if you are a Team Lead and you are not setting an example, ang kapal ng mukha mo!! Wala kang pakinabang!!!

Also, most recruiter gauge “commitment” based on the number of years an agent stayed in a call center which is technically incorrect. It should be based on the number of days an agent is “physically present” in a call center. An agent who has no absent for six straight months who suddenly went on AWOL might have a reason to do so? When I’m doing background check, there are just three information I want to know: How long did he stay in your company? And in those times how many times did he go on absent? Does he has any fraudulent activity that is customer related? I don’t care about escalation because everybody commits mistake. As the saying goes, “When you reach the boundary of what you know, it’s time to commit mistake.”

(2)          Adherence

Adherence is your ability to stick to your break schedules. As stated, you are being paid per hour and every hour the call center has to maintain a specific number of workforce to maintain the so called “line adherence.”

There are instances wherein you will miss your break because of a very long call or you miss your break because the workforce management updated the schedule without prior notice. You might also miss your break because you are looking at the wrong date of the calendar tabulation. All of these things are just one of the possibility. And most of these are somehow forgivable when done twice or thrice.

The most unforgivable of all when it comes to adherence is the so called “over break” or taking a break more than the prescribed period allotted for you. Another instance would be the excessive use of “bio–break” or taking a break to pee. “Bio–break” comes from the word “bio” which means “life” and should only be used for “life–threatening” situation. It should not be used to smoke a cigar!!! If you are doing so, ang kapal ng mukha mo!! In fact, call center should give heavy punishment for those who are abusing bio–break!!! Bio–break should be deducted to employee’s salary at any cost!!!

(3)          Average Handling Time (AHT)

Average Handling Time (AHT) is your ability to process a call within a prescribed time frame. That timeframe is measured the moment you receive the call to the time you are ready to receive the next call. As defined, “up to the time you received the next call”, it is because “after call work” or ACW is included in that time frame.

After call work (ACW) is the time you spent documenting a specific call details after you hang up the phone or after the customer hang up the phone whichever is “technically legal” in a call center.

There are call centers wherein they will default your line to ACW up to 30 seconds after your call to give way for documentation and there are those wherein you need to manually press it. And there are those call centers who are stiff in prohibiting ACW. Yung mga ganyang call center nilalayasan yan!! Di tayo robot para di payagan mag–ACW!! Others will attribute it to “multi– tasking” wherein you should already be documenting your call while you are talking. If that is the case, “oh ikaw na dito kung mas marunong ka pa saken”.

Besides, AHT is average of all the call within a fiscal month so one long call doesn’t necessarily represent the handling time itself. It’s all about your ability to manage your call in a given timeframe. Kanya–kanyang deskarte yan! Although one key to a low AHT is for you have to be highly organized. Organized in a sense that you know where to pull up the information needed for a specific inquiry and knowing where to process it thus the set up or organization of your desktop should be highly efficient to be able to do that. Unfortunately, most Filipinos who has “Sanguine personality” are culturally a “scatter box” when it comes to organization. There are those who has “Melancholy personality” oftentimes labeled as “obsessive compulsive” but they are the one who are meeting the AHT.

Another thing you should know about AHT is the concept of “Quality versus Quantity”. That is, “the lower you’re AHT, the lower your Quality Audit score”, “the higher your AHT, the higher your Quality Audit score.” It is because “quality” is inversely proportional to “quantity.”

Analyze it, those who are receiving the highest volume of call in a fiscal month are the one who are scoring low to Quality Audit. On the other hand, those who are receiving the least volume of call in a fiscal month are the one who are scoring high in Quality Audit. It is because, it is difficult to consolidate quality and quantity. If you do so, we will see how credible will that be.

The only challenge now to Operations Manager and Service Delivery Managers is, “Who’s bringing in the money? The one with low AHT or the one with good Quality Audit?” Read further then & you will be surprised!

(4)          Quality Audit (QA)

Quality analysis is a means of ensuring that every call was being executed in a coherent manner as prescribed by the client. It is also a means that information being given to customers are accurate to prevent confusion or future escalation.

Unlike AHT which is objective in nature, QA is subjective in nature. What is “sorry” for you may not mean “sorry” for me? My resolution is perhaps the best resolution because of my experience but for a Quality Analyst it may not be because he or she doesn’t have a “hands on” experience on the account and his or her opinion might just be based on those calls he or she has audited.

Let me give you an analogy when it comes to Quality Analysis,

Suppose an agent is taking 20 calls per day, five times a week, then, that is:

20 calls per day x 5 days a week = 100 calls per week

100 calls per week x 4 weeks = 400 calls per month

Quality Audit is being done once a week, then, that is:

1 QA per week x 4 weeks = 4 QA audits per month

Let’s do the math then,

400 calls per month ÷ 4 QA audits per month = 0.01 x 100 = 1%

The question now is,

Does that 1% representation of QA audits enough to know the true representation of the agent when it comes to quality?

It’s as if to say, “Aaayy! May patay kang kuko! So therefore, masama ang ugali mo! Masama ang budhi mo! Karumal–dumal ka! Is it fair to say like that? Whereas, yung patay na kuko na yon just represent 1% or less of the total body of the person!!!

Do you see the analogy now?

Another factor also would be the credibility of the person performing the audit? Ano ba alam ng QA nayan about the account? Pag pinagsuot ng headset yang QA na yan at mag–take ng calls, Can she do better than the score she gave with that agent she audited? Talaga lang ha!!! O baka naman isa siyang “QualityAnalyst without Quality”.

Truth be told, to quantify the true “quality” of an agent, we have to apply the Pareto principle again and that is auditing 20% of the total call of the agent per day. Thus, if the agent is receiving 40 calls per day, then:

40 calls per day x 0.20 = 8 call audit per day

That “8 call audit per day” should be randomly selected by the Quality Team Manager & NOT by the Quality Analyst Staff to prevent bias wherein “ugly calls” or “short calls” are deliberately being selected to humiliate the agent.

What will happen here is the higher the volume of calls, the higher the volume of audit. The higher the volume of audit, the higher the number of analyst auditing the call. What’s happening in most call center is that they are just assigning 1or 2QA per account thereby resulting in “no quality at all” campaign because the QA is racing against quantity also in terms of number of calls to be audited per day.

To ensure quality, the equation should be:

Number of teams = Number of QA’s

Thus if there are 12 teams, there should be 12 QA’s as well if the call center really wanted to ensure quality wherein 20% of the calls will really be accommodated. Otherwise, they should not call this metric “Quality Audit”. It should be named instead as “Call Ethics Adherence”. Does it has to be “politically correct” in terminology to fit the standard? The answer is “Yes.” Agents are being punished if they are sending the wrong information thus we also have to correct the term we are using when quantifying an agent’s performance. See the picture sa mga walang pinagkatandaan sa industriyang ito!!!

And if it is “Call Ethics Adherence”, wherein there will just be 4 QA audits per week, the relative weight of this metric should not be more than 10%.

Another term you will hear on Quality Audit is the so called “Calibration”. Unlike QA audit wherein the call is being audited by “one staff”, in calibration, the call is being audited by “multiple staff”. Those “multiple staff” calibrating the call will brainstorm their scores for a specific call.

I once joined a “calibration” which is composed of one Operations Manager, one Team Leader, one QA staff facilitating the calibration and five agents. Technically, OM, TL and QA is not that knowledgeable when it comes to product specifics but for those agents who knew the product, “kung makapang –okray, akala mong ang gagaling! I even said “We already marked her down for that instance under this parameter, do we have to mark her down again under this parameter”.

If you are joining a calibration, make sure you are analytical and objective, unbiased and highly knowledgeable about the product. Oftentimes, the parameters being set forth for quality audit doesn’t necessarily represent the ultimate gist of the account.

(5)          Transfer Rate

Transfer Rate is the number of calls you have transferred to another department or another agent. The reason why transfer rate is being quantified is because those calls are not paid by the client.

There are call centers who are monitoring transferred calls especially when the call is a misrouted call. This is where you will see the imperfection of the system itself. If a call is supposed to be for Billing & Collection then why is it directed to the Retentions Department or vice versa. Some Team Lead will let you list down the numbers by which the call was misrouted but the problem would still be persisting.

(6)          Voice of the customer (VOC) / Customer Satisfaction (CSat)

Questions pertaining as to how satisfied or dissatisfied the customer is done by a series of concise question through text message or email which is also known as survey.

Some call center’s metrics put high emphasis on CSat, others on First Call Resolution (FCR). Others will embed FCR within CSat.

There was a saying, “You cannot please everyone, if you do, you lose yourself”. Likewise you cannot give the world to the customer. You can only give what you are allowed to give. You cannot give what is not yours to give. Also, businesses exist for profit. The opposite of business is charity which exist for donation. In this industry, you need to know this very basic fundamentals to maintain your sanity especially when it comes to VOC or CSat.

There are customer who will give you high scores on survey even if you didn’t resolve their issue which is attributed to “customer experience”. There are customers who are asking the impossible who, if you didn’t give into their demand will hit you on survey. The least you can do as an agent is just to do your job as it is and if the company will fire you because you are not receiving good surveys then experience is everything. Magagamit mo yan when you transferred to another company most especially when you are climbing the corporate ladder. See item #9.

The shitty of all customers you will have are the racist. For this type of people, no matter what you do to please them, it is already indelibly written on their neurons that we are an inferior race. Timothy Ferris on his books, Escape the nine to five…..” recommended to eliminate those 20% of the customer who are demanding too much.

Also, humans has the propensity to highlight the negative instead of the positive. It is because the positive side of life is easy to deal with while the negative one is hard to face.

In some call centers, there is the so called deep divers wherein if the customer give a failing score they will call back the customer and ask their opinion as to what will make them give a higher score or probe why they scored low. Oftentimes, most of this customer is already asking the impossible.

(7)          Revenue per call (RPC)

This is an LOB specific metric if you are on a Collections Account. Collection account may either be in inbound or outbound. Inbound Collection is if customer is calling you to process a payment for them or if you could convince them to pay instead of a payment arrangement. Outbound Collection is if you are dialing or if there is an auto–dialer to call a customer to collect their past due for a specific subscription or service. The payment itself is the revenue.

Depending on the call center, revenue per call may be set between $35 to as high $75 per call. The higher the call volume you have, the more effort you should strive to be able to collect. It is because “payment is inversely proportional to call volume.”

Assuming, you are receiving 30 calls per day and RPC is set at $35, then before the end of the shift, you should have collected $1050.

30 calls per day x $35 = $1050

Let me share to you the techniques on how to be able to meet the RPC:

First, determine your average call per day.

Second, collect as “higher than RPC” as you can in the first four hours of your shift plus buffer especially in the first two weeks of the fiscal month.

Third, once you collected enough, you can relax on the latter part of your shift or on the last week of the fiscal month.

Using the above example of 30 calls per day, don’t be satisfied with just $1050, collect up to $1250 to serve as your leverage against those customer who are paying below the RPC target. Collecting more than the RPC target may not be good for you especially if the call center is not giving something in return. You just need to take it by moderation.

The best thing about Collections Account is that you have power over customer. It doesn’t have VOC or CSat thus if you are not thriving for a

CSat–driven accounts, this is the LOB for you. My mindset is also simple, “Ginamit mo na yung serbisyo, magbayad ka!” If you are in Inbound Collection, chances are, customers are calling you because their service is disconnected and they want you to reconnect their service. It’s a “two–way process”: You need something from me, I need something from you, then let’s talk which is unlike Customer Service which is a “one–way process” wherein customer will call you and you have no choice but to submit from their demand or lose on survey. I’m sort of sadistic also for I love squeezing every penny in customer’s pocket just to be able to collect. I don’t care if they have baby to feed, I don’t care if they lose their job. My mindset is clear, “You use the service then pay. If you can’t afford it then do some lifestyle alteration!”

Others find this LOB difficult, for me it’s a piece of cake that is why every time I’m seeing a job opening for Collections, I always target that account.

(8)          Sales conversion

This is an LOB specific metric as well if you are in a Sales account.

Sales conversion, as the term implies, is your ability to convert a specific inquiry of a customer over the telephone to a guaranteed subscription to a service. Sales could either be inbound or outbound as well.

Sales is not really for everybody. The type of people who should be here are the “Sanguine type” of personality. And who else excels in these type of LOB but the “trannies” and “cross–dressers”. They are the type of people whom we can call as “maboka”.

Most applicant in a call center don’t want to be profiled in a Sales account because of fear of rejection or the fear of meeting a specific quota. Truth be told, Sales can be learned. But then again, learning is a two–way process: a Sales Coach can just teach you the fundamentals while the Sales Rep will do the execution. The most common objection you will hear on customer’s side is the rusting “I don’t need it”. If you are selling a satellite FM, Sales Coach will tell you “then create a need for them”. As a Sales Rep, you just need to find your way how to create that need for them either by checking their profile or what you hear on their background or by what they are saying. For me, I know all these things, there is just one flaw: I don’t believe in the product. “Eh wala nga akong ganyan, paano ko pa mai–o–offer ng ayos sa customer yan.”

The first thing that you should believe in when you are in a Sales account is the product. If you don’t believe in the product: “Para kang nagtitinda ng ballpen sa tapat ng National Bookstore”. Second, your Team Lead should be a top seller also, one agent on my class told me that his TL told her “Ano? pasusuwelduhin ka na lang namin, wala ka nang ibibigay”. If you are encountering those kinds of TL who are just waiting for you to sell and in the end they will receive a fraction of what you have work hard for, layasan niyo yan!

There are also called “upselling” and “cross–selling”. Upselling is when you are upgrading a product. If your primary product is “cable”, and the customer only has the economy type of cable, you may upgrade it to deluxe type. Cross–selling is when you are selling something related to the primary product. If you are on a post–paid Telco account, you may want to cross–sell an insurance or a telephone accessory and so forth.

The best thing about Sales account is, the income is unlimited (especially if it is tax free) by virtue of sales commission. This is where the money is. Laway lang ang puhunan mo dito! You will earn a lot of money without exerting too much effort but just the power of words! The major drawback of Sales account is the so called “scam”. Dito maraming scammers especially those who are on outbound Sales.

There are accounts in call centers wherein it is sugar coated as Customer Service but the metrics include Sales. If you are not comfortable with this kind of LOB or when you applied, the disclosure is that it is Customer Service or Retentions but the actual job description as well as the metrics are all geared toward Sales, give the call center a good return of investment for a year and then leave.

Sales conversion is computed through the number of calls receive divided by the number of closed Sales:

Closed Sales ÷ Number of calls x 100 = Sales Conversion

Example:

3 closed sales at the end of the shift ÷ 30 calls in a shift = 0.1 x 100 = 10%

Sales conversion in a Sales account range between 15% to 20% and as part of the metrics, it is between 20% to 25%.

So therefore, if the passing score for the account is 85 and ang sales conversion mo is just averaging between 10 to 15% per day then you are technically at 75% percentile rank and the next thing you know ligwak ka na!!

(9)          Percent Saves

This is an LOB specific metric as well if you are in a Retentions account. It is computed by the number of calls divided by the number of Saves from cancelling.

Most customer who will call you or be transferred to you are actually cancelling the account. Your task is to retain them as much as possible otherwise it will translate to lost in profit on part of the company. And if they lose their profit, you lose your job. Retentions is the second line of defense of a company when it comes to profitability. First one is Sales.

Retentions is a fairly easy Line of Business. The key here is for you to have a superb knowledge about the product against your competitor. Usually, an updated price from competitor is provided by the client.

Here are some of the steps to retain customer:

First, know what they like about the product.

Second, where are they transferring?

Third, bombard them with information about your product as compared to the competitor  

Example 1:

I would like to cancel my cable. I got a better offer from another provider.

CSR: What channel you watch more often?

Customer: the Oprah Winfrey Network

CSR: Where will you be transferring?

Customer: to “Fish Network”

CSR: You know what? If you will be transferring to them, Oprah Winfrey Network is under their deluxe package and their deluxe package is $99, and with us it is under economy package and you are only paying $79 and that’s $20 difference and $20 x 12months is $240. Don’t you think it’s a big savings?

Example 2:

I would like to port out my number. I will transfer to another carrier.

CSR: I just need to know, Do you text more often or do you call more often?

Customer: None of your business!!!

CSR: Would you be kind enough to share to me where will you be transferring?

Customer: None of your business!!!

CSR: As I can see here you were averaging 40 text messages per day and you are only paying 0.01c per text. If you will be transferring to “Horizon” or “Sprinter” they have poor signal on your location and they are charging 1c per text. I don’t want you to be on a hassle of porting out your number then porting in again. You can’t find nowadays providers charging 0.01c per text. I believe this is the best provider for you. 

One advantage of being in a Retentions account is you will also know what the other company has thus if you will be profiled to the same type of business or account in another call center at binwisit ka ng TL mo, alam mo na kung paano mo sila ilalampaso!

(10)     First Call Resolution

First Call Resolution is the number of times a customer called within a specific time frame for the same issue that is supposed to have been resolved the first time she called. The time frame is usually set for 1 week or 1 month depending on several factors.

No system is perfect. Even the software you are using to assist the customer is not perfect. It has glitches necessitating the customer to call back. Also, with American’s culture of dependency where everything has to be spoon fed, expect FCR to be low.