Church Mutual Insurance Company Contact Center Achieves Its Fourth Certification as a BenchmarkPortal Center of Excellence

The Church Mutual Insurance Company customer contact center has been certified as a Center of Excellence by BenchmarkPortal, a leading contact center research and consulting organization. “The achievement of the Center of Excellence represents a contact center’s commitment to delivering customer service that is both effective and efficient,” said BenchmarkPortal CEO Bruce Belfiore. “It is the culmination of important initiatives that were undertaken to achieve sustainable service excellence.”    

To achieve certification as a Center of Excellence, a company must undergo a rigorous call center benchmarking process, which compares the organization’s operational metrics to those of its peers, using the world's largest database of contact center metrics. During this process, BenchmarkPortal experts audit and verify key data from the contact center applying for certification.

An In-Depth Investigation - Agent Voices Research Report

The report includes intriguing cross-tabular analyses, such as full-time vs. part-time employees, overall satisfaction broken down by commuting distance and at-home agents, size of center and geographical location.  It also includes a sampling of open-ended responses, providing context and depth to the statistical results, and indicating what agents really feel about their colleagues and employers.

http://www.benchmarkportal.com/store/call-center-industry-reports-22-kpi/agent-voices-research-report

Survey Underway on Inbound and Blended Sales Centers

See how your Center performs in an instant.

Click on the link below to participate in our Survey for Inbound and Blended Sales Centers and receive free instant reporting at the end of the survey. This competitive market intelligence is not available anywhere else and is our way of showing our appreciation for your input.

You will receive the following:

• Instant Benchmarking Report -  Find out how your center stacks up against up-to-the-minute averages on all reported metrics for the inbound sales industry.
• Instant Gap Analysis - Find out where to direct your resources and get the biggest returns by identifying your center's performance gaps.
• Live Look-back Report - Return to Survey results to see updated averages at any time.

Click on the link below to start the Survey now.

http://benchmarkportal.inbound-sales-survey.sgizmo.com/s3/

Our Benchmarking surveys are the easiest way for a call center to benchmark themselves against peers in our database of thousands of call centers. BenchmarkPortal, has collected key performance indicators from thousands of contact centers worldwide, creating the world's largest database of best practices statistics.

What is Your Cost of Turnover? and why you should know it

Do you know what your true cost of turnover is? When I ask this question to groups of call center managers, few raise their hands. Yet it is important to know how much it costs to recruit, on-board and train agents for two main economic reasons: a) turnover often has a major negative impact on the center’s costs; b) knowing your cost of turnover can help you get approval for upgrades you need to make in the areas of recruiting, hiring, agent satisfaction, agent dashboards, etc.

Costs you should include in your calculation are:

• Advertising in all the various media you utilize
• Initial screening for candidates, including the people who review submissions, the technology used to test applicants’ skills and aptitude, and the costs of telephone interviews to determine their phone presence
• Final selection processes, including scheduling and conducting in-person interviews, realistic job previews, background and reference checks, etc.
• Training costs, including salary and benefits paid to new hires during training, allocated trainer costs, costs of training facilities and technology, as well as costs of on-demand training programs.
• Transition or “nesting”, including expert help needed during this phase
• You can also estimate a cost for getting to full competence, which often takes a year or more.

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United Concordia’s Government Business Operations Contact Center Achieves Certification as a Center of Excellence

The United Concordia’s Government Business Operations customer contact center has been certified as a Center of Excellence by BenchmarkPortal, a leading contact center research and consulting organization. “Only the top 10 percent of those benchmarked annually achieve this distinction,” said BenchmarkPortal CEO Bruce Belfiore. “Achieving Center of Excellence certification is an acknowledgement of strong management and leadership in the call center industry.”

To achieve certification as a Center of Excellence, a company must undergo a rigorous benchmarking process, which compares the organization’s operational metrics to those of its peers, using the world's largest database of contact center metrics. During this process, BenchmarkPortal experts audit and verify key data from the contact center applying for certification.

Factors (called key performance indicators) such as first call resolution, cost per call, call waiting time, customer satisfaction, agent satisfaction and utilization of human resources are taken into account. BenchmarkPortal is able to scientifically gauge how the contact center being studied compares to other centers in the same industry, and if the performance of the contact center is superior. Customer satisfaction, which relates to customer loyalty and business growth, is the goal, balanced by financial metrics which show that the center is being operated efficiently.

“Center of Excellence certification indicates that the contact center delivers superior customer service within a responsible cost structure,” said Belfiore. "A great contact center operation reflects its management's passion for balancing the demands of high quality and low costs. United Concordia has shown its ability to achieve that balance through its objective performance metrics. We have validated its metrics and have certified that United Concordia is, indeed, among the best in its industry. I congratulate United Concordia on a job well done.”

“Contact centers that achieve certification are remarkable in their ability to balance a commitment to service excellence with cost effective service strategies,” added Belfiore, who has been with the company since 2000.