Hi,

I have been tasked to reduce the number of calls we recieve into our customer service call centre, we currently handle 10,000 calls per month (average) and we have a customer base of roughly 10,000 customers.

Is there an industry standard for how many calls we recieve vs our customer base?


any replies will be appreciated

Gary,

Very hard question to answer.

It's kind of industry specific.

For example you could base an insurance centre on...
Usiny your hypothetical customer base and a ratio:

Number of policies (a) + Claims Ratio (b) + Weighting (c).

In other words.

(a)One call per customer per year (Renewal) 10,000

(b) Say a claims ration of 63% (arbitry number) so another 6300.

(c) Another factor for administartion (eg:moves) 2% = 200

Therefore 16500 calls per year.

But....... That's VERY finger in the air forecasting

Your historicals are going to be the
best source for a long range forcast, weighted
with the figures for client base growth.

HTH.


Good luck.

DaveA

The place to start would be with an analysis of why people call in the first place, and to look for patterns. Actually putting a figure on how many calls you should be receiving would be quite unreliable, without knowing (a lot) about the business.

However, you should be able to identify specific areas where calls could be reduced, starting by avoiding the simple calls, such as 'Can I have you address please', What time do you open'.

Sarah is right to say:

The place to start would be with an analysis of why people call in the first place, and to look for patterns.

But after you have looked at the simple reasons she mentions I bet you will find a massive proportion of failure demand

"What about the question I called in with last week..."
"I don't understand the the letter/bill you sent me..."
"I am still waiting for the such-and-such..."
"You messed up the..."

Failure demand - demand generated by a failure of some sort by the company.

Get rid of the causes of the failure demand and you could reduce the number of calls coming in by multiples of 10%.

On;ly when you have got rid of all of that failure demand from within should you worry about what others are doing.

Rob

Thanks for the response, my original post was kind of vague...

I work for a Telecoms supplier who have not had a Call Centre proper in place before now (we had a group of people answering customers queries over the phone and via email but no strcuture) The agents I have answer 70% of calls within 20secs, they answer Cust service, Tech support and Billing calls.
We have a Team Lead (me) I have introduced KPI's and implemented new ways of tracking what the major issues are we get our calls about however since the call centre proper is in its infancy I have identified some big issues (ownership of calls, First Call resolution)

"I have been tasked to reduce the number of calls we recieve into our customer service call centre, we currently handle 10,000 calls per month (average) and we have a customer base of roughly 10,000 customers.

Is there an industry standard for how many calls we recieve vs our customer base?


any replies will be appreciated"

Gary,
Who has given you this task and what was the reasoning behind this? There is obviously a feeling within your business that you are taking a lot of unnecessry calls.
Or is it that many of the calls you deal with could/should be dealt with by IVR?