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Services Company news South Africa

5 keys to unlock the success of your South Africa call centre

As the call centre market continues to grow, South Africa has emerged as a highly appealing location for organisations' call centres or business process outsourcing companies. The young, determined South African call centre workforce is expected to increase by 25% over the next two years. While the economic opportunities are promising, call centres can be overwhelming.
5 keys to unlock the success of your South Africa call centre

Call centres in South Africa have to monitor thousands of calls while maintaining the highest customer service level and finding the optimal solution to measure KPIs will improve overall performance. VoIP service providers for South Africa call centres offer a variety of insightful tools. However, specific key outbound metrics are more important to keep track of than others, and it's critical to know which.

The essential outbound contact centre metrics

There are many KPIs to monitor. Discerning which ones reveal the most about your South Africa contact centre can be difficult. CommPeak, the premier cloud contact centre solutions provider, assembled the five most critical metrics to evaluate in your next outbound campaign if you strive to optimise success rates.

1. Answer success rate (ASR)

Answer success rate, or ASR, is the number of successfully connected calls out of the total attempted ones. Good call centres in South Africa have an average ASR of 40-50%. If your ASR is anywhere above 60%, your services are nothing less than perfection.

2. Average handle time (AHT)

To better understand your agents' efficiency levels, monitor the average handle time. Essentially, AHT is the time it takes for an agent to complete interactions. AHT indicates how well-organised agents are. For the most part, this KPI should be relatively low.

3. Occupancy rate

The occupancy rate of your South African contact centre is the percentage of time agents spend on call-related activities compared to their idle time. This metric identifies agents' efficiency. If the occupancy rate is low, then your agent's efficiency could be better optimised.

4. Calls per agent

The call per agent KPI establishes how often agents are on task. The metric highlights how well your agents contend with the average number of calls received per day by your South African contact centre. Unmotivated agents will have low a low call per agent metric.

5. Call quality/etiquette

Call quality defines how well agents connect with customers. Because etiquette is qualitative, there are no industry standards. However, there are guidelines agents should follow during a typical conversation. There should be protocols for how agents start and end the calls and lead customers towards a resolution.

Tips for monitoring and optimising your South African call centre metrics

Setting benchmarks

Before your first outbound calling campaign, it's imperative to outline industry standards. Do the research and get in touch with seasoned South Africa call centre managers. After running your business for a while, set personal benchmarks based on past results. That way, you can make tailored modifications to your South Africa call centre campaign.

ASR

ASR is used to identify the network quality. When deciding which communication provider and routes you want to adopt into your call centre, you have first forecast potential call volumes, traffic demand and measure your infrastructure's overall performance.

AHT

To reduce AHT, implement tools that optimize the call routing process. With the CommPeak Dialer or Lead Routing solutions, you can forward leads and other communication tasks to the right agent. Proper routing ensures that prospects are connected to the most appropriate agent based on language, experience, and different skill sets, thus reducing AHT.

Occupancy Rate

Focus on monitoring call volumes and call routing. With the CommPeak Dialer, you can easily divide agents into groups based on specific skills and assign them responsibilities accordingly. You can also fully automate this process for your South African contact centre with the CommPeak Lead Routing solution. Whichever tool you chose, you can easily control and track how much time agents are active versus idle.

Calls per Agent

Easily monitor agents' performance with CommPeak PBX Stats. The prognostic CommPeak Dialer can also help improve this critical metric by streamlining the dialing and lead distribution process. With our Dialer, agents no longer need to dial manually and can focus on higher priorities such as closing sales.

Call Quality/Etiquette

Whether you utilise the CommPeak Dialer or Cloud PBX, make sure to record all agent calls. Then, thanks to CommPeak's Speech-to-Text service, you can easily convert those files into text. Use the quick keyword search to discover how your agents are speaking with leads.

Conclusion

Once your South Africa call centre has recorded a solid history of KPIs and metrics, you can more intelligently plan your marketing campaigns to maximise efficiency and profitability. Moreover, you'll have the necessary knowledge to create optimal outbound sales templates and procedures that improve conversion rates and customer satisfaction scores. In the end, your contact centre in South Africa can implement the ideal sales approaches to meet business targets.

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