How to reduce your Call Centre cost

Lowering operating costs for call centre management in today’s economy is critical. But how? The answer lies in driving agent performance ensuring that their time is well managed. It is a well-known fact that the human resource, people, component of a call centre is the highest cost factor of a call centre. By streamlining and optimizing the servicing processes, you will reduce the time spent on unnecessary work and utilize your call centre agent’s time to maximum. The metric to measure the success of this optimization is Average Handle Time (AHT).

The AHT metric will assist call centre management in the following ways:

• Driving agent performance
• Scheduling and calculating staffing needs
• Measure accuracy and effectiveness of the servicing process
• Managing high call volumes
• Consider the impact of customer service quality of every call handled
• Lowering Costs

So how is the AHT reduced without compromising the quality of the call or the service provided?

First let’s consider how AHT is calculated. The formula used is:

“the total amount of work time related to calls, including average talk time (ATT) and average after call work time (ACW), divided by the number of calls handled.”

Don’t forget that the call centre agent should first act as an ambassador for your company by the average talk time (ATT) then act on behalf of your customer by performing the after call work time (ACW). You do not want to compromise these, or the quality of your customer service will suffer.

To lower AHT is a simple 5 step process:

1. Analyze the existing servicing process by mapping the contact flow and identify components in the process that can be maximized, minimized or eliminated.
2. Improve the efficiency by employing technology to assist agents without adversely affecting call quality.
3. Coaching call centre agents to minimize valuable, wasted seconds on the phone by scripting an introduction that will begin each call efficiently.
4. A comprehensive, educational program of the products and services will build useful knowledge for call centre agents so that they can have a working knowledge.
5. Measure daily and note the improvements or lack thereof. Remember we cannot manage what we cannot measure. Note all the changes required and prioritise what is most needed for the desired improvement.

AHT is an important operational indicator only, and you call centre management should not get distracted by the figures. The focus for all call centre professionals and staff must be to act as ambassador of their companies while at the same time act for and in the best interest of the customer – always!

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