It’s called the “hospitality” industry for a reason. Because when customers deal with a large hotel chain or other leisure-focused enterprise, they expect the very best in service – to be treated courteously, with great respect for their personal time and comfort, and with a can-do attitude towards problem solving.

For many customers, their first encounter with a hospitality enterprise is over the phone, through a call center. These call centers handle everything from family vacation reservations and inquiries to group sales and conference scheduling for multinational companies. For these call centers, two metrics are especially important:

• High first call resolution (FCR): meaning that a customer’s issue, problem, or request is addressed on the initial call, rather than requiring the customer to call back at another time or be referred to another party; and
• Low average handle time (AHT): meaning the duration of time a customer must remain on the phone line to get their question answered or problem solved.

Call center managers can monitor these two key metrics by using call recording software. Call recording software can provide detailed, up-to-the-minute information through automatic reports delivered directly to a call center manager’s desktop. These reports, which can be monitored weekly, monthly, or even hourly, can reveal:

• Real-time information about the call center’s FCR and AHT rates to ensure that targets are being met and to provide alerts when they are not.
• Insight into agent performance by seeing a report of how agents are doing with respect to high FCR and low AHT; the manager can learn immediately how agents are measuring up to pre-set performance thresholds.
• Details about high volume times: in particular, which days and/or times of the day might require more (or fewer) agents.

Also, when analyzed on a long-term basis, these reports can reveal geographic data about where the highest volume of callers come from and offer insights into the effectiveness of advertising and marketing campaigns.

In addition to these real-time reports, recorded customer calls – which can be listened to at a later time – can provide valuable information for future training, both of individual agents and for entire groups of agents.

In the dictionary, “hospitality” is defined as the friendly and generous reception and entertainment of guests, visitors, or strangers. Make sure your call center measures up to those words.