Call Center Benchmarking - Dress For Success

							?The idea of call center benchmarking is pretty simple. You compare your contact
center's performance to the performance of top-level contact centers in your business
sector and in the contact center industry as a whole. If the benchmark is done properly
you will also glean an abundance of information on how these top level call centers
achieved success. You can then use that information to develop new process for your
own contact center and emulate the successful strategies.

Your benchmarking efforts must be structured and systematic, but still be flexible
enough to allow innovation for gathering new information. If you are not experienced
in call center benchmarking, then you will want to hire an outside consulting firm to
help you.

The call center benchmarking process has four phases: planning, analysis, integration
and action (Call center consulting firms are available to help you with these four
phases).

Call Center Benchmarking Process

Phase 1: Planning Phase

This phase is the most important because the information that is gathered has to be
completely error-free since all remaining phases will be built on the benchmarking
information from this phase.

In this phase, contact center management will identify which processes in their
contact center are most relevant from the customer point of view. In this phase you
will have to decide on the effective use of new processes, the potential benefits and
costs of switching to these new processes and the time-frame for the transition.

Phase 2: Analysis Phase

In this phase you analyze the data collected in the planning phase. From the data, you
must tease out the reasons for other contact centers having better benchmarking
outcomes. From this analysis, new processes will be developed for your contact center.
The goal is to create a process that is better than the process your using as the
benchmark.

Phase 3: Integration Phase

This phase is the connection between the first two phases (planning and analysis) and
the fourth phase, action. After upper management has approved the proposed changes
to the call center processes, the organization can move ahead and integrate the new
processes.
Management has to be committed for this phase to play out properly and new
functional goals have to be agreed upon.

Phase 4: Action Phase

Implementation occurs during the action phase. In this phase a plan is developed, a
time schedule is created, responsibility for implementation is assigned, and targets are
set.

Upper management has to be involved in the action phase and they have to be
accountable for each new process being implemented. Once a new process is up and
running, there must be a report that describes all of the benefits of this new process.

Once you are properly benchmarking your performance you are on your way to call
center certification.


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Call center benchmarking and call center consulting are very in depth fields and this
article is just about the basics. On a similar not, if you want to find the best call center
certificatoin program then look no further than SQM Group. They have been
certifying call centers for nearly a decade.