Hi

I work for a Inbound call centre at Mumbai. The foremost problem we face out here is high handling time for out site.. any suggestions on how one can reduce the same ?

Hee hee... Sorry.

What are you making your comprison against? another call centre answering exactly the same calls?
If so the see what they do and change your process to match. IF you have no benchmark to work from the look at what actions your agents are taking and try to improve the efficiency of the workflow. Moving a button or streamling a process can make all the difference. Watch and learn from the best agents, you will often find some people are consistyantly faster than others see what they do to achieve this (as long as it is not at the expense of quality).

Hope that helps!

your second suggestion was much better that th efirst.. thanks... we do not have any bench marks as such, and i would try your another suggestion

Could you ask the customer for their identifying info (order#, Account#, etc...) in the ACD/IVR and use CTI to have the customer information on the agent's desktop? (I'm an IT Manager so technology is always my first thought.)

Is it actually that your agents are spending that much time 'talking' or is most of it spent waiting for screens to update, etc? Perhaps you need to improve the speed of your computer system(s).

If they are manually looking up information in paper books or catalogs, are they easy to get to, indexed and tabbed to help them find the right page quickly?

In other words, take 3 agents (best, middle, worst?) and time their processing. Break it down into the components and then see where you can make the agent's work easier and faster.

Best of Luck!

First question, and its purely because of your location, are you currently utilising any form of skills based routing? the reason I ask is that now we have moved (particularly in Asia) to the IP model call centre, skills based routing is an almost impossible mission. Lets face facts, having an agent that is specifically trained to deal with the call in question has several very positive effects, a. the customer gets the right info, b. the opportunity for cross selling is amplified & c. If the guy on the phone knows what he is talking about the call is dealt with quicker.
Implementing forms of skills based routing needn't be a costly process, just requires a little thinking about, and think of the cost savings by not having to multi-skill and therefore multi-train agents.
My other question is how are you measuring your AVHT, from the moment the call hits the switch to the end of wrap-up or on actual handling time? If it is the former you may find that at certain periods during the working day the AVHT is quiet respectable, however there are certain periods that could be discribed as diabolical! If this is the case I'd suggest having a look on the workforce management arena for a software package to fit the bill, by staffing your centre for "Peak Hours" you can acheive two major advances, firstly because the majority of calls are being handled effectively because you have staff to answer the phone this dramatically brings down your queue time and therefore you AVHT (if thats how you're measuring it) secondly by paying for staff only at times that you need them you can reduce your wages bill (or pay for expansion to cater for the next project to come along)
At the end of the day I would leave you with one point, AVHT is not the be all and end all of success within the call centre environment, remember customer care and call quality are equally important.
Hope you find a solution that fits the bill.
Regards,

Phil Hall

Total handle time needs to be defined accurately, It is Talk time plus wrap time. Without the wrap it is just talk time.
Technology can help to reduce handle time however it may push up total handle time for a call, eg from the second the customer enters the VRU to the second the customer closes the wrap process. More efficient from an agent point of view but slower from the customers point of view. This is obviously important for call centres outside of the country of origin of the call because every second taken on an international call costs money or bandwidth (or both).
So we have AHT as an agent performance measure and total call duration as a call centre performance measure.
Your agent AHT should fall around a standard bell distribution curve with the bulk at the central point. Extremes will occur but mostly these can be ignored unless the main peak starts to drift one way or another.
Find your AHT find you best and worst agents and do a comparison also look at a mediocre agent to find what is typical then make changes to a group of agents and monitor their performance against a control group to see what effect is had.
Good luck.

I agree with Marianne regarding technology supporting AHT. If your systems are slow or complicated, the 'talk' time might just mean 'waiting around on the system' time. The system should be an extension of the actions you wish to accomplish on the call. A solid CTI application will help, depending on your business, and will also allow the agents to build a quicker rapport with the caller.

To Alex's point, AHT should absolutely be an agent measurement - remember, the counter-balancing measurement should be quality, via monitoring, adherence to call handling guidelines and customer sat. One group I worked with determined that a one-second decrease in AHT for their center was equal to $50,000 US in operating expense over the course of the year. You just have to be careful not to go to that well too often, as handling time will be/should be only so low.

Most groups we work with find that measuring talk time (ATT) and wrap-up time (ACWT) as two separate agent measures has worked well. Talk time represents the agents' ability to conduct business at a particular clip, even though IT issues may hinder that statistic. Wrap-up time, however, totally controlled by the agents themselves, and measuring it separately can gain you a quick win in overall AHT.

Brent