Anyone got any good ideas for an incentive to run in a call centre focused on improve call handling times? many thanks
HELP NEEDED - INCENTIVE IDEA
Call Centre Helper Forum » Call Centre Management
(6 posts)
I like incentives which reflect the theme. The bottom line is that if you manage average handle time you can handle more with less people so why not offer time off as a reward. You offer a proportion of the time you save to the people who made the difference and so people understand the reason for you wanting to reduce AHT in the way they are rewarded.
Posted 1 year ago
Hi,
I think you need to be very careful when incentivising a reduction in call time. You risk losing the quality of the call, what type of calls are you handling?
You also risk people simply hanging up on customers so their handle time looks better. Unless you are monitoring and measuring every single call this could quite easily go under the radar..
Yes less people = less cost to the business but better service = more business...
Coach to improve call handling and incentivise the real drivers to your business.
Kind Rgds
Mairi
Posted 1 year ago
I completely agree with Mairi, we have seen the results of single focus incentives all too often. If you still mean to incentivise to reduce call handling time you need to expand the remit of the incentive to counterbalance the AHT targets with Quality targets.
As a planner I would always shy away from time off as a reward, but you can incentivise people with their ideal shifts (shift selections based on ranked performance - the best person gets their ideal shift)
Mark
Posted 1 year ago
I ran an incentive on AHT but not directly on reducing it. Of course the challenge is maintaining the quality, and when communicating to the agents it needs to be made clear you aren't "rushing" them.
The need for us to have an incentive was based on the widely varying AHT of agents. Agents who handle the exact same mix of calls, and who had worked for around the same length of service, has very different AHTs. Some agents had 120s whilst others had 300s
Picking an arbitrary number like 150s would disregard what the customers want. If a shift in call nature doesn't result in a shift in target AHT something is wrong. Likewise, telling everyone to cut down 20s wouldnt be appropriate as everyone has a different amount of "fat to trim"
By monitoring calls we identified a number of agents who consistently achieved 100% in call quality, but did not have a long AHT as they were quick to identify a customers requirements.
These benchmark agents gave us a nice idea of what is and isn't reasonable. We then set the incentive to deliver an AHT within x seconds of the team average.
Arguably those who are potentially sacrificing service and working too quickly are an even bigger problem than those who could go faster. We sold it as delivering greater consistency (after all that's what we want, consistently good service, rather than half ok and half fantastic)
The end result was we managed to train the slower agents, up to the speed of the average, and ensure the fastest agents aren't rushing, but including all the important info.
As the profile in calls change, so does the average, and so does the target. This approach isn't for everyone, and if you are hard focused on improving efficiency you might not get the reductions you are looking for, but it is a safer approach.
Posted 12 months ago
In addition to incentive, you might want to verify that your infrastructure is working properly. For example with regards to audio quality, according to the latest UK Contact Centers Decision Makers guide, improving audio and speech quality can positively impact overall contact center performance: “calls were handled more quickly, fewer mistakes were made with data collection and overall, agents handled an average of 10% more calls per day”.
Posted 11 months ago
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