Call Center Benchmarking

Creating call center benchmarks is a great way to structure your telesales operation. However, if you rely too much on a goal oriented approach, you may miss the forest for the trees as far as customer relationship management is concerned. After all, if you put undue pressure on your team to achieve an unrealistic or overambitious goal, you could deflate workplace morale and ultimately burn your people out.

This is not to say you shouldn't aim high. However, a better way to achieve your call center benchmarks might be to recalibrate employee performance on a daily basis. Constantly be training your operators--both new and old--in the psychology of caller management. For instance, you might want to run weekly modules on cross selling and top-selling.

A Better Call Center Benchmarking System

It also helps to train your operators in advanced web-based telephony. For instance, VoIP protocol now allows you to make toll-free telephone calls over the Internet. If you have an applicant who speaks a foreign language, you may assign her an international call database for a day to flex her multicultural muscles.

The point is that, while you need benchmarks of success and routine to ground your workers, you also want to energize them by varying their tasks. If representatives feel that every day at work is the same, they'll be less excited to work with customers and more apt to quit or leave for a competitor's firm. Push your employees to their limits not by forcing arbitrary sales goals on them but by expanding their skill sets.