How Modern Call Centers Work

Innovative Telecommunication Solutions

In this day and age, most people vaguely understand what a call center is. People make calls to buy clothes, food, books, consult with a doctor, apply for a service, solve problems with a product, etc. In general, one makes a call with a particular purpose and doesn’t care where the middle man is physically located. That’s one of the ways call centers have stayed in the shadows for almost 20 years, and only after work in call centers became a topic of popular TV shows Americans realized that the US is a Call center country.

How a Call Center Works

Communication channels connect call centers with the ‘outer world’. Channel capacity rather than agent numbers defines how many clients can stay on-line with a call center. If your channel capacity is designed for 90 callers, the 91st caller will not be able to reach you and will hear a ‘busy’ dial tone. The phone number that callers use doesn’t matter at all, everyone will reach the call center regardless.

Inbound calls go to a phone station that distributes them among operators (in-call centers they are called agents). If all agents are busy, the station places call in a queue and they are further dispersed to free agents. Our phone station can queue up to 1000+ calls. Learn more about our telecom and equipment.

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Ability to organize call queues and work further with them is one of the major advantages of a call center, unlike multichannel phone lines. The thing is, when all channels of a multichannel phone line are busy, you still lose calls. And what is even worse – you don’t know how many calls you lost. It might be that your employees are only able to receive 10-15% of the calls generated by your advertisement and all other clients hear a ‘busy’ tone. A call center allows you to avoid such situations and gives you numerous solutions to work with queued calls.

Managers and agents are able to receive live information with numerous parameters that show how the call center is handling its load. That information includes the number of calls queued (for the call center in general and each agent’s group separately), maximum hold time in queue (based on the caller with the biggest waiting time), average hold time, average call duration, etc.

The major parameters are:

Average Speed of Answer (or ASA) – shows how long on average a client waits for an operator response. ASA is recalculated every 30 minutes.

Abandon Rate (AR) – the rate of callers that hang up before connecting with an operator. 2-3% is considered acceptable. Our call center provides 4-10 seconds wait time with a lower than 2% abandon rate. If AR exceeds 5%, actions must be taken to resolve the issue of losing potential clients.

Service Level (SL) – percent of calls for which the hold time did not exceed a set number of seconds. As an international standard, no less than 80% of calls must be serviced in 20 seconds.  Of course, real SL can vary. For management purposes, it’s calculated every 30 minutes, as well as every week or month.

Call centers offer detailed statistics in percents, clients, sales volume, etc. After receiving these statistics, you can plan your long and short term marketing campaigns, advertisements, promotion events, and be confident in the result. It gives you an opportunity to provide quality customer support and not lose even a single important call.

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Front Desk Helpers Co, 2019. Change your business mind!

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