Retention Process and its KPIs in Call Center

Existing customers play a pivotal role in the growth of every business. Losing old customers in the business can cause you a damaged reputation, loss in business revenue, and diversion of new customer traffic.

Undoubtedly every business owner understands the role of old customers in their business hence they outsource their customer service segmentation to a dedicated call center or BPO. These call centers provide good customer service on behalf of the brand as well as they also work on retaining customers. 

Retention Process and its KPIs in Call Center

In today's blog, we are going to understand the role of call centers in retaining customers. 

Before proceeding, let's know the agenda of today's blog.

• What is the Retention process?
• How does a call center retain customers?
• What are the KPIs of the retention process?

Without further ado let's understand What is Retention process?

What is Retention Process?

Most call centers have a dedicated department that works on retaining the existing customers for a brand this department is known as the retention department and the process is known as the Retention process in a Call Center.

Call centers offer outsourcing and retention services to different domains such as telecommunication, health care, e-commerce, etc.

Now, let's understand 

How does a call center retain customers?

A call center can never independently retain the customer as they are bound by the contract of 3rd party (enterprise) however business or brand can authorize the call center to offer loyalty or other benefits to retain the customer.

In addition to these offers, the call center works on creating SOP (Standard Operating procedure) and other training guides to coach the staff on how to retain customers.

There are different ways by which a call center retains a customer. A few of them are mentioned below:

• By rewarding loyalty benefits.

• By compensating for the existing bill.

• Free or trial services for a few days.

• By offering discount coupons.

• Work on the feedback shared by customers.

KPIs in the retention process

There is a contractual agreement between the brand and the call centers on what are the KPIs in the retention process. 

It varies as per the nature of business and contract between 2 parties however below are some common KPIs in the retention process:

1. Churn %:

Churn % is the percentage of data exhausted out of total data received in a specific period. The client provides data to the call center which is then uploaded on the dialer and handled by the call center executives.

For example, if the client provides 800 data numbers the to call center on a specific day and the call center was only able to churn 400 numbers then the churn % is calculated on :

Data exhausted by call center / Data given by the client

In our scenario, this is 400/800 = 50%

Churn % plays an important role in the retention of customers as a higher churn % is the possibility of more retention.

However, this is not the case always. For a better result dialer team should judiciously use the numbers given by the client.

2. Connected%:

Connected % as the name refers is the percentage of the call which gets connected to the customer out of the total calls churned. 

During the churning process, several numbers might not get connected and can be unresponsive.

For example, If the client provides  800 data numbers and 400 numbers were churned in a day but out of this 400 only 200 numbers were connected to customers.

So the connected % can be calculated by the below formula:

Connected to churn ratio :  200/400 = 50%

Connected to total leads ratio: 200/800 =25%

3. AHT:

AHT is one of the most common KPIs in every process. Unlike the inbound process, in the retention process, there is a higher AHT target. The reason for this high AHT target is to provide enough time for the call center executive to engage with customers.

What is Average Handling Time in a call center

In most of the outbound processes, the AHT target varies as per the nature of the business like in the retention process the idle AHT target should be between 10-15 mins.

4. CPH:

CPH is another KPI that is crucial for any process. CPH stands for Call/chat per hour. The more calls taken by an agent higher the number of chances to increase the retention %.

Hence we can assume CPH is directly proportional to retention %. The idle CPH in the retention process should be 25-30 calls.

5. Retention %:

The retention % measures how many customers were retained out of the total lead received. Retention % can be calculated in 2 ways.

1.Retention% with respect to connected calls

2. Retention % with respect to total leads received

To check the actual productivity we should focus on the 1st measure i.e retention % concerning connected calls.

In addition to above mentioned KPIs, there are several other KPIs that depend on the client requirement and nature of the business.

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