AHT the sometimes forgotten Contact Centre ROI metric
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By Stewart White |
As a great Direct Marketing (DM) professional you no doubt know your Return on Investment (ROI) attributes, metrics and calculations backwards, but there always seems to be one Contact Centre metric that flies below the radar for a lot of consummate DM professionals, that being Average Handle Time (AHT) of Contact Centre calls!
Gee, I'd love an extra dollar for every time I have worked on a project where I have been able to identify opportunities to improve the client's business with a focus on AHT as a key metric in their ROI calculations and modelling.
What is Average Handle Time?
Call Centre Audits
AHT is the average handle time of either an Inbound or an Outbound call and generally includes talk time (TT) and processing times (PT).
Another way to look at the metric is to say it's the measurement of time the Customer Service Representative (CSR) is dealing with the call transaction; being broken down into the time they talk to the caller as well as any processing time they have to facilitate during or at the end of that transaction as a result of that particular call.
As we all know the time a CSR spends talking and dealing with a customer is a direct cost so therefore a direct expense in your ROI model hence its importance!
How or where do I find AHT information?
It is a metric that is generally regarded as a standard inclusion on Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) and Dialler systems reports. Being provided at both individual CSR and summary levels.
The metric is usually reported upon in minutes and seconds or just seconds and should appear in your most commonly produced reports.
Why is it so important as an Inbound Metric?
Measurement Reviews
Call Center Services Performance Measurement and Benchmarking
All Inbound calls coming into your business have an associated cost and therefore any opportunity to potentially reduce the call handling time may reduce your total transaction costs, positively altering your ROI values.
Be warned though it's not simply a matter of focusing on reducing the average handling times to increase ROI values. Falling into that trap can prove to be a dangerous mistake!
Potentially you can end up reducing your service offerings to the customer at the time of their initial call which can result in blowing costs out further down the line or missing entire opportunities to increase overall sales.
A classic example from a project that I worked on with a large financial institution saw the client having a strong focus on reducing their AHT for all incoming calls. Aggressive targets were set for reducing AHT and subsequently achieved with the transaction savings results being considerable.
All seemed good and for a few months with the operational budgets reflecting increased savings.
Then the Company saw an increase in operational expenditure as a result of increased incoming calls (not as a result of any new business initiatives) and a decline in cross and up sell opportunities (hence sales).
You guessed it, the focus of managers and CSR's to achieve reduced AHT's meant that incoming calls were not being prompted for cross and up sell opportunities, and first call resolution metrics plummeted as CSR's were not asking if they could help the caller with anything else when talking to them, hence they called back again!
Another relevant opportunity this metric provides is giving operational and campaign managers the visibility of where they may be able to make process, campaign, skills or system changes to alter the AHT to benefit the business, whether that be by reducing or increasing the AHT times per call type. (Generally speaking process changes should always help to reduce AHT!)
Why is it so important as an Outbound Metric?
As with inbound calls, all outbound calls being produced from your business bare an associated cost and therefore AHT becomes a pivotal metric which can greatly affect your ROI values.
Once again though never fall into the trap of assuming that you should decrease your AHT's on outbound calls, as this may have the opposite desired effect of what you are ultimately trying to achieve.
An astute company that is fully aware of the importance of AHT metrics tests and models every campaign before go live.
This sounds like a lot of hard and extra work but the effort pays off!
For every campaign that goes live they have massaged their offer, scripts, and CSR expertise so that they maximise the AHT component of the campaign transaction to reap the best benefits of the campaign whilst still meeting their budgeted transaction costs.
What things can change AHT?
The obvious answers here are the time your CSR's are talking to a customer and the time taken to process any needs the customer has during that transaction time.
But let's dig deeper on both fronts and identify broadly the opportunities that go hand in hand with these two components, they include:-
- Scripts
- Offers
- CSR abilities
- Systems and Technology
- Processes
Any or all of these attributes can have a dramatic effect on your ability to meet or exceed desired AHT KPI's
What's a good or best practice AHT?
This is a question that I'm asked constantly by many of my clients and my stock standard response is “how long is a piece of string?” which leaves most of them puzzled as to my response!
The bottom line is that AHT is dependent upon so many attributes (as tabled above) and is different in every client company or silo within a client company that I have worked with that it can sometimes be misleading to quote “good” or “best practice AHT” when asked.
After my initial response I then like to walk my clients through a quick proven process that I suggest they undertake so they get a strong feel for their own businesses AHT metrics so that they can become self aware and informed. (the secret is encrypted in the next point)
How do I get a feel for a reasonable AHT?
All I can say (without charging you!) is constantly look at the metric from your inbound and outbound reports, notice the variances between the highest and the lowest results, take into consideration all of the variables that have an effect on AHT and start creating a picture of how your AHT should look, what attributes will have the most effects to change it and what's right for your business!
It's pretty easy but if you want some help to kick start the process feel free to give me a call and Genroe can help you along the way!
(A Call Centre audit could be a perfect launch pad to get things going! Refer to my article on Call Centre Audits for further information!)
Why is it so important as a ROI value?
Well figures speak volumes so here are a couple of real case examples!
One company I worked with modelled their AHT figures and acknowledged that by reducing the call times on a pool of relevant incoming calls by one second per call they would save the equivalent of 1.5FTE.
They undertook the initiative, made the savings (without reducing their service provision) and then apportioned those savings to their incentive budget (which in turn saw an increase in the percentage of conversions!)
Another company I worked with modelled their AHT for their outbound operations and saw that by increasing their AHT by 30 seconds per call (on a specific campaign type) they were able to increase their conversion percentage by 0.75% yielding a $300,000 increase in profit (that included the extra costs for increased call length) another win-win situation.
In summary
By now you have probably acknowledged my excitement over AHT and the flow on effects this metric has on Campaign ROI values?
In saying so I hope that this article has given you some further understanding of it importance and value!
I invite you to learn more about the services that Genroe can provide by simply contacting me on .
P.S. Don't forget to have a look at our 31 Point Diagnostic Tool, its free to download and fun to do, and welcome you to share yours results with me
