One aspect of customer satisfaction is the percentage of customer queries that are able to be dealt with on the first call. To measure this, a customer contact management system is required. But as customer contact management systems are expensive and require significant customization, most call centers don't have them. And even the unsophisticated process of measuring average call duration by type of call is not widely practiced. Even customer satisfaction as rated by customers themselves requires the manual tabulation of posted surveys or the use of an IVR application.
Many call centers have neither.
Thus, while other measures are more relevant, many call centers place an inappropriate emphasis on measures and are easily obtained. Related to this is the perception that because certain statistics are obtained from the ACD MIS, and have been collected for some time, they must be important. In Call Center Performance Management Terry Dettmann, a director and chief scientist at Emerging Technology Solutions International noted that in one call center, calculations performed on statistics from the ACD MIS suggested that 100 to 150 agents would suffice to handle the calls. Investigation revealed that the ACD MIS was reporting talk time only, yet a substantial amount of non-call time was spent resolving customer issues. Although that center was measuring talk time, they needed to measure the time taken to resolve customer issues.