Contact Center: Measure Effectiveness by Sales, Not Calls, Per Hour

When evaluating your contact center staff, you’ll likely want to establish a performance standard, but what standard works best? In an NCOF session last week, Tim Holody, chief operating officer with jewelry cataloger Seta Corp. (Palm Beach Jewelry), made a case for catalogers to get away from old measurements of calls per hour in the call center. Instead, he suggested that call centers adopt a sales revenue per hour metric.

“We’d probably like reps to take eight calls per hour,” he said. “Multiply that by (Seta’s average order of) $150, and we’d want reps to generate $1,250 in sales per hour.”

On the other hand, Holody doesn’t want his customer service reps to be driven by call volume. “The last thing we want them to do is be thinking, ‘I have this customer who keeps ordering from me, but I have other customer calls to take, so I have to get off the phone’,” he said. “Let that rep keep talking to that customer as long as the customer is legitimately buying something.”

Holody noted that in measuring sales revenue per hour, catalogers can do more. For instance, the firm recently instituted an upselling program primarily geared toward customers calling to check on their existing orders, which has yielded a 10 percent gain in sales.

Customers spend their time calling you on your dime, he pointed out. You have the opportunity to spend an extra minute to optimize revenue per call. “Once you already have them on the phone and they’ve already said they want to buy some of our jewelry,” Holody said, “you’re doing them a service to offer them a jade ring. All you’re doing is pointing things out in the catalog. We’re giving our reps a greater opportunity to make money. And that’s all the more reason that metrics should be set at sales revenue per hour.”