Operations: Two industry veterans share their insights on using Benchmarks & Best Practices

Barry: When you look at benchmarking data for multiple companies, you’ll want to know which companies are efficient or offer good customer service. Additionally, we’ll often throw out the highs and lows in our benchmarking studies, as they may be unrealistic levels to try and achieve or can signal some errors in the data. We use a weighted average to more fairly represent the average. For example, if you look just at calls taken per agent per hour, a super-efficient company may have a high number there. Or they may use IVR [interactive voice response] for a high percentage of transactions.