Call Detail Records (CDRs) – A Veritable Mine of Information for Call Centre Managers
Understanding the metrics
When running a call centre, or a team of call centre agents, it can be difficult at times to understand changes in performance and agent morale.
Most call centre managers will have access to the agent statistics or have access to CDRs that can be used to obtain critical data such as talk time, average talk time, contact rates, sales and conversion rates. However, this information may be impacted by a large number of variables such as agent morale.
Whilst managers will target agents on these key metrics, sometimes it is at the expense of basic call data such as the number of dials, answer rate, unobtainable and busy. However, these pieces of key statistical information remain at the heart of telesales performance monitoring – the more calls you get answered, the more your agents’ KPI statistics will increase, including performance.
If you are consistently monitoring this information – ideally on an hourly basis – you will have a better understanding on which times of the day and days of the week offer the best answer rate, and in turn this will help you to make better decisions when it comes to training, meetings, agent hours, breaks, and ultimately, it is these decisions which make the business more successful.
How to take this to the next level
Once you have a good understanding of your core call information and when your call centre is operating at its peak calling hours, it’s time to continue profiling your call statistics by looking at the mobile/landline split. By breaking down the answer rate for mobiles and landlines again – by time and day, you will gain an understanding of the optimum times for using landline and mobile data, thus maximising your contact rates. Once you have this information, you can then pre-load your dialler with different calling patterns – such as exclusively mobile for the first 3 hours of the ady and only landline after 5:30pm.
If you have individuals’ title information provided within your call data, this can be used to increase answer rates from your core call information by splitting the data into male and female contacts. By mining your call data, you will be able to find out which hours and days dialling males and females will give you the best answer rate. Dialling females during earlier hours of the day will almost certainly give a better contact rate then males.
Once you have been able to collate and interpret your call centre’s contact rates by time and day, by mobile vs landline and by the gender of your called party, you will have already increased your performance (or be able to provide factual evidence as to why performance has varied).