How to calculate and reduce DMC in a call center?
In a call center, every interaction with a customer is an opportunity to boost satisfaction and loyalty. However, one question persists: are your agents spending too much or too little time on the phone? Average Conversation Time (ACT) is a key indicator that can help you answer this question and improve the efficiency of your customer service.
Whether you're faced with CMDs that are too long, signalling inefficiencies, or too short, suggesting a lack of depth in the exchanges, this article will provide you with the keys to measuring, interpreting and optimizing CMD to turn every call into a positive customer experience.
What is Average Conversation Time?
Definition
Average Conversation Duration, or ACD for short, measures the average time an agent spends interacting directly with a customer during a call. It's a crucial KPI that helps assess the effectiveness of these interactions.
If properly interpreted, this metric will enable you to make the necessary adjustments to improve advisor training or your internal customer service processes.
Why isn't DMC enough?
CMD is an integral part of a set of key measures for evaluating the call efficiency of your customer relations center. These measures include Call Waiting (CW) andAfter-Call Work (ACW ), which are defined as follows:
- Average Conversation Time (ACT ): The average time spent by an agent conversing directly with a customer during a call.
- Hold (MEA): The average time a customer is put on hold during a call.
- After-Call Work (ACW ): The average time the agent spends on administrative tasks after the call has ended, such as entering notes or updating the database.
The Average Treatment Duration (ATD ) combines these three indicators and is simply calculated by adding them together:
DMT = DMC + MEA + ACW
By measuring LMD, you get a more complete picture of your agents' efficiency and productivity. This holistic approach enables you to identify opportunities for improvement at every stage of the call handling process.
For example, a short CMD combined with a high MEA or ACW could indicate that agents are spending too much time on non-conversational tasks, which could be a sign of inefficient processes or training needs.
As a result, DMT offers a more global perspective that enables you to better assess your call center's performance, manage resources more efficiently and improve customer satisfaction. By taking into account all stages of call handling, you can make more precise and relevant adjustments to improve the overall performance of your customer service.
How to calculate DMC?
Calculation formula
To calculate DMC, you need to add up the total duration of all conversations during a given period, then divide by the total number of calls.
The formula is as follows:
DMC = Total duration of conversations for the period / Total number of calls for the period
For example, if over the course of a day, the total talk time is 300 minutes for 100 calls, the DMC will be 3 minutes.
How to interpret CMD?
CMD is an interesting tool for measuring the effectiveness of your agents in solving customer problems. However, the interpretation of CMD needs to be nuanced and contextualized:
A long DMC may indicate inefficiencies, training problems or complex internal processes. But in some business sectors, the complexity of products and services or requests naturally requires more time to process.
Conversely, a very short SCD could mean that agents aren't taking enough time to resolve complex requests, which could have a negative impact on customer satisfaction. On the other hand, a short SCD could also be a sign of efficiency and speed of processing.
It is therefore essential that you take into account the specifics of your sector and your customers' expectations in order to make informed decisions based on this KPI.
Examples of average conversation times by business sector
As explained above, DMC varies considerably by industry. Here are some averages by sector, according to data from Call-Center Magazine:
These average conversation times illustrate the differences in the nature of customer interactions by sector:
- Consumer/Professional Services: With an MCP of 3.55 minutes, this sector is characterized by relatively short interactions, often focused on customer service issues or requests for quick information.
- Financial services and insurance: The 4.01-minute MCP in this sector is slightly higher, reflecting the complexity of financial issues and insurance products, which generally require detailed explanations and further verification.
- Government and public sector: With an MCP of 4.13 minutes, interactions in this sector tend to be longer, due to the administrative procedures and detailed information frequently required by citizens.
- Healthcare: The 3.38-minute MCP in the healthcare sector can be explained by the need to provide accurate medical information and answer sensitive questions, while maintaining an effective conversation.
- Hotels and catering: With an average of 3.11 minutes, this sector is characterized by rapid interactions, often linked to reservations, questions about services or general inquiries.
How to optimize your call center's DMC?
Boost your Quality Monitoring with Speech Analytics
Speech Analytics is a major asset for Quality Monitoring processes, as itautomatically analyzes telephone conversations between agents and customers.
This artificial intelligence technology, specialized in contact center use cases, can help you to understand the reasons why a DMC is too long, or even too short, by identifying recurring problems that needlessly prolong conversations.
Support agents' skills development
Improving DMC inevitably involves ongoing training for your call center agents to enhance their ability to resolve customer issues quickly, while delivering a good customer experience.
Thanks to the data provided by a Speech Analytics tool like Batvoice AI, you can also provide more precise feedback on the performance of each agent.
Based on the results of these assessments, you'll be able to offer training courses targeted to the individual needs of your advisors, and provide personalized coaching to those requiring additional support.
Optimize your internal processes and scripts
Develop clear, concise scripts that help agents navigate quickly through calls while providing quality assistance. Also consider reducing unnecessary steps and simplifying internal processes to enable agents to resolve issues faster.
Track and analyze the impact of your actions
Set up dashboards that track CMD and other KPIs in real time, such as the aforementioned LMD or the First Contact Resolution (FCR) rate, to ensure proactive management of your action plan on an ongoing basis.
