Benchmarking Efficiency on a Small to Medium Size BPO Call Center

Now if you are a major outsourcer I'm sure you have this down pat. I was surprised in the past year when I had the opportunity to see many small (100 seat) to medium (300 seats) centers really had no reporting on the efficiency of their center, programs, and/or teams.
This is not very difficult to do and can really help endear yourself to upper management when you are the one who brings this to their attention.

The following is a general example of how to do this.

In the outsource world most of the clients that we worked for on the inbound/customer service side paid us by the minute. For this example we are going to say that if have a revenue goal of $24-26 per hour/rep. So that is our goal, make sure each of our reps are making $24-26 per hour for the company.

How do we do that?

First we need to be able to measure this. To do this we take our cost of goods sold, which for this example is our payroll hours, divided by the amount of minutes each rep was in a paid state. (We are going to say we have a client that paid us for ring time, total talk time but not after call work/wrap time)

You can look at this by program, rep and at the center as a whole. I would suggest you set your profit standard to make sure that you are 75-80% efficient each day. That means for the total amount of minutes the company pays in rep payroll hours the company needs to bill for 75-80% of those minutes. For my supervisors I broke it down and told them we need each of your reps to be talking about 45 minutes out of the hour.

We would then look at this each day with a break down like this (now this is basic but gives the idea)
Payroll hours 100
Ring time: 1 minute
Talk time: 69 minutes
Hold time: 5 minutes
Time in a paid state: 75 minutes
Non Billable Minutes
Available time: 10 minutes
ACW/Wrap time: 10 minutes
Break time: 5 minutes
So let's say we are getting paid .55 a minute if you are getting .55*45 minutes (75% efficiency) we would be making $24.75 per hour.
We now have a metric to benchmark our reps with. If we were below 75-80% for a day we could now look how to fix it. We would look at the metrics then and see if the reps were over break, if they were in after call work too long, were they waiting too long for calls? We could now quantify our issues to fix them. You as the call center manager can see exactly how much each program has made based on how efficient you were.

Now that is efficiency for getting paid for the calls you are taking. For a company who is trying to make their in-house center their profit center we would look at things a little differently.
For an in-house contact center that has a cross sell or selling aspect we would need to look at our cost per call (for our purpose we will look use payroll hours here again) then look at the dollars per contact or amount per call that we are bringing in. Once we know what is attainable and what will meet the company's profit expectations we will know the goal for each of our reps to hit per call. Noticed I did not say qualified calls. We are looking at overall profitability so we must look at each call.

We have just benchmarked the center from an efficiency/profitability standpoint and we can now see where reps fall. You will normally see in the beginning that 20% of reps exceed, 55% are average performers and 25% are far below standards. That's where we start the work.

If you need help in getting your contact center costs down then look at http://www.expivia.net. We can lower costs while adding to your customer satisfaction.
Contact me at tlaird@expivia.net
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