How long are callers waiting to talk to a live person about your product? Do you know?
If it's more than 25 seconds, it is too long. Actually the industry-wide objective is that 80% of calls should be answered by a live person within 25 seconds—an objective that’s seldom actually met.
However it is possible to find firms out there that are able to meet or beat this objective 100% of the time.
And if your call center isn’t meeting this objective, its time to look for someone new. Because if your call center is not getting to your customers within 25 seconds or less, you are losing business.
It’s time to check up on your inbound call center
If you currently use an inbound call center, it is important for you to routinely request call performance reports. And if you have not done this recently, now would be an ideal time.
In fact, I've recently talked to my staff about doing regular call center audits for all my clients.
To get a true feeling for your call center’s efficiency, you need to ask for these 3 reports: Average Call Length, Average Wait Time and Abandoned Calls.
An Average Call Length report tells you several things. It will help you determine if enough time is being spent with a prospect or, conversely, too much. It will also help determine if the call center’s staff is adequate to keep response time in an acceptable range.
Your average call is unique
However, average call time will vary greatly based on your call requirements—are they sales calls, customer service calls, tech support, etc., and they will vary also greatly based on the complexity of the product being sold or serviced.
The Average Wait Time report will tell you how long callers are waiting before their first contact with a live person at the center. As I mentioned earlier, it should be less than 25 seconds.
And the Abandoned Calls report will let you know the percentage of callers that hang up before they ever talk to a representaive. This is another key indicator of potential problems with your call center.
Again, like the wait time, this number will tell you if you are losing too many prospects; if this number is over 6%, you need to be looking for a new call center.