Learning to Speak Contact Center-ese

While getting familiar with the contact center industry, one of the most challenging things is familiarizing yourself with all the terminology and acronyms. In hunting around I found a call center “dictionary” of sorts which you can find here. I thought it might also be useful to briefly summarize some of the key terms which you might encounter and explain how they could impact you if you were selecting an outsourcer.

Talk Time – This includes the total time spent on a call when an agent is talking to a contact. It’s the time from when the phone is answered and the agent says “hello” right to when the caller hangs up.

Wrap Time – This is the time at the conclusion of the call when the agent is still working on something to assist the contact, however the actual call itself is over. This might include data entry, etc.

HT – This is an acronym for “Handle Time”. Basically this includes the entire length of time required for dealing with one customer contact. The HT includes the talk time of the call plus the wrap time.

AHT - You might also hear AHT which stands for “Average Handle Time”. You can get this by taking the total of all the HT’s for a particular group of calls divided by the number of calls in that group to get the average.

When shopping for an outsource contact center AHT can have a strong influence on the price. Most outsourcers charge a price per agent minute or per agent hour. While a potential service provider that offers a cheaper rate per minute might seem like the obvious choice, shaving a few seconds off the AHT – for example a shorter wrap time – can result in significant savings when multiplied times your total number of calls.

When you’re shopping around, ask what techniques each center has for reducing the AHT.  If they don’t know what an AHT is, refer them to this blog (and choose a different provider).

Comments

[Vaibhav]

Dear Jeff Fettes,

I am impressed to see your blog and it is well organized. I am sharing few more jargons of call center which will be more helpful to understand and make the things easy while working at call center.
Kindly read this small list:

Automatic Call Distributor (ACD)
Average Speed Of Answer (ASA)
B2B (Business to Business)
Business Process Outsourcing (BPO)
Calling Line Identity (CLI or CLID)
CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility)
Computer Telephony Integration (CTI)
Digital Access Signaling System (DASS 2)
IP: See Internet Protocol
Local Area Network:LAN
ASCII: American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Pronounced 'askey', this is used to describe the binary code for text.
Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
Session Initiated Protocol (SIP)

I hope it will be helpful for all of us.

Vaibhav Pandey
http://www.vcarecallcenter.com
India’s one and only end to end CISCO based IP network.

[Shayan Sanyal]

I would make a minor correction for the context of this blog. Even though Vaibhav is correct in that CSR stands for Corporate Social Responsibility, it would probably be more appropriate to refer to the other expansion of this acronym: Customer Service Representative.

Also:

FCR = First Call Resolution
TCV = Total Call Volume
IVR = Interactive Voice Response
CTI = Computer Telephony Integration
LTV = (Customer) Life Time Value

[A. Vermeer]

ABOLISH AHT !

Contactcenters using ‘AHT’ (=Average Handle Time) as a KPI (Key Performance Indicator) make a very big mistake ! The task of Contactcenters is to serve customers memorably, to generate more revenues than expenses for the company as a whole and to exploit all (sales)opportunities, also within an economic downturn. Operating at the highest levels certainly does’nt mean processing the most calls in the shortest possible AHT, constantly driving agents to a AHT that nicely links to a ‘budget’ ! Striving to produce bad service a few seconds faster will not have any effect and rewarding agents on the basis of a short AHT is a real recipe for disaster. The customers are the ultimate losers ! Some old-fashioned Contactcenters unfortunately still focus on a reduction of AHT and fail to recognise the immense opportunities that customer contacts gives them. They should realize that AHT drives behaviour to rush customers. There are really no benefits at all in calls being rushed as quickly and as cheaply as possible by minimizing AHT (neither for Contactcenters nor for customers). The Management should realize that serving a customer memorably does not imply that a customer or a call is a thing to be ‘handled’ …as quickly and as cheaply as possible (after all, a customer doesn’t want to be handled, he wants to be served !). We should realize that Contactcenters are a strategic asset and one of the most underexploited resources in modern enterprises. So, we should exploit literally all opportunities to align the companies actual business objectives with organizational goals such as profitability, revenue, return on investment (ROI), earnings per share (EPS) and company growth. Contactcenters have immense sales opportunities for the company as a whole, they have the ability to further secure and strengthen the relationship with existing customers (customer satisfaction, retention).
Losing high life-time customers greatly increases cost to companies, because the cost of acquiring new customers is TEN times as high as the cost of customer RETENTION. Failure to exploit these opportunities will put Contactcenters – and the companies they serve -at a growing disadvantage.
Let’s not beat about the bush : if you reward short AHT’s, you will finally get short AHT’s ! But you will also get lousy service, agents in too big a hurry to satisfy the customer, lower sales/upsell/cross-sell, less appointments and retention, more call-backs and complaints and a lousy ROI. As a package deal, you will also get lower agent-motivation, stress, burnt-out agents and higher training cost for new hires. It’s as simple as that. Why don’t Contactcenters “get it” ???
Taking it from the perspective of Contactcenter agents, AHT is a metric (KPI) which largely depends on MORE THAN 14 (!)circumstances and situations which CANNOT be controlled by the AGENT !

Moreover, we should realize that ‘performance’ or a ‘KPI’, as a Contactcenter defines it, goes well beyond measures such as AHT, because :
> the validity of the results from AHT is doubtful because there are no industry agreed-on definitions or standards on applying it ;

> focussing on lowering AHT will have many undesired consequences, amongst others for the number of sales and for the balance between quality and customer focus (i.e. retention and customer-satisfaction) ;

> defining success and measuring in AHT is a blunt and obsolete internal metric which has little to do with enterprise reality and with what a Contactcenter should most care about ;

> measuring in AHT it is short sighted, counter-productive and causes problems in other areas of the Contactcenter ;

> given the immense opportunities of customer contacts, running a Contactcenter as a ‘Costcenter’ (= “a department in the organization that does not generate profit”) is a pure waste.

No wonder that there is a loud and growing call to measure and define success in Contactcenters with more value – and outcome-oriented metrics than AHT. Increasingly, Contactcenters are only measuring in profit-based metrics (such as OCR, number of sales and appointments, ROI).

Eliminating AHT in a Contactcenter pays off with improved sales conversion, first-call resolution, customer satisfaction, retention, revenue, ROI and EPS, thus putting the Contactcenter into a much stronger strategic and rewarding position within the organization as a whole.

As a result, more and more Contactcenters enter into negotiations with their board of directors in order to transform their Contactcenter from a ‘Costcenter’ (“the poor stepchild”) into a sound ‘Valuecenter’ !

[A. Vermeer]

As a supplement to my above comment, I am pleased to ascertain that other experts, like Tripp Babbitt, in the meantime also made it clear that AHT (Average Handle Time) is very oldfashioned (rooted in the “Command and Control thinking”, a productivity mindset of over 100 years old), has completely run it’s course and is no longer tenable in Contactcenters !

Please go here : http://blog.newsystemsthinking.com/blog/my-brand-of-insanity/0/0/call-center-aht-average-handle-time-wrong-measure-wrong-solutions

[Live Answering Service]

I am definitely agree that one of the most challenging things is familiarizing those terminology and acronyms. Thanks for bringing this up,I enjoyed reading it,and the comments as well,very informative..

[First Call Resolution]

I my opinion, First Call Resolution (FCR) / First Contact Resolution is the best metric by which to measure performance.

[Average Call Duration]

Actually, I also agree with many of the statements made in the comments above from A. Vermeer. AHT can cause some real issues in measuring the "right" thing.

[ClubPenguinCheats]

I am sharing few more jargons of call center which will be more helpful to understand and make the things easy while working at call center.