Key KPIs for Outbound Call Centers

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Read the complete transcript of this clip:

Kent Nicholas: Being able to brand the call is one thing, but also being able to understand, what's the impact of that? What's the value from an ROI perspective of leveraging this product? And so we're able to use different types of variables out there. The primary one is call disposition. And for us, just being able to know if that call was answered by a human, if it went to voicemail, busy. And even another KPI out there is whether or not the call was declined.

So those are two of the main KPIs that we really want to try and work with. We want to enhance answer rates and we want to hopefully decrease decline rates because that person knows exactly who's calling. So those are kind of the basic ones. And a lot of times they pop really well for clients, but sometimes your answer rates may be a little bit flat, but there's other data that really is probably even more valuable.

For answered phone calls, we start looking into the call duration or the actual talk time of that call starting in from when the call was answered to when, and that call duration metric can be very valuable. What we've found is that calls lasting 10 seconds or less, for the most part, are really not much better than an unanswered call. There are some use cases where short-duration calls are very important, but for the most part, we tend to look at calls that last for a minute or two minutes or longer as what we call a successful call. So we couple that with our answer rate information, and now we start to have a pretty good view of what sort of impact have we had as far as not only the answer rates, but also being able to hopefully have the display out there so it gets the people knowing who it is, and yes, I want to take this call at this point in time and I'll have a interactive interaction with them.

We also have access to the called number, but not the true raw called number, just because we are very CPNI-compliant. We don't want to have that A number, B number, date and time of call, and call disposition metrics available. So we hash that B number in a way that we cannot get back to it.

But it allows us to create some additional metrics. The first one is looking at the total number of unique phone numbers that were called, and that's reach basically. So it's great to know how many calls were made, but it's even more important to know, "Okay, I got a hundred thousand leads and that's the book of business that I have to work through right now."

From there, then we can go through and look at contact rates. Contact rate, in our vernacular, is any individual that answers at least one phone call. And taking that even a step further, is to be able to look at answered calls, an individual that answers at least one call and has a successful interaction.

So those are the major KPIs. There's a lot of different offshoots from there. Being able to look at first,call answer, rate, first call contact rate, some of those things. But that's the gist of the analytics that we start to work with and how we present that back to the client.

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