Call Centre
A call centre is a department of an organisation that provides specialist services via the phone. This can be anything from answering technical queries and offering support for both business and consumer products to answering and dealing issues for financial institutions. Call centres can have a focus on taking ‘in bound’ calls, such as those described where people phone a call centre to ask questions or ‘out bound’ where personnel are employed to make sales or find out other information via the phone.
AHT – Average Handle Time
AHT is a measurement or analysis (report) used by organisations, often within a call centre environment, whereby the time spent by personnel on the phone is recorded and measured and an average of that time is taken across all staff and individuals. It can be useful to compare against how long on other similar companies employees spend on the phone as ultimately the faster a person can resolve an issue the more calls they can take or make. This fits in with the adage ‘time is money’!
Yield Management
Yield Management is a report similar to AHT whereby the details of telephone calls are recorded and analysed to find out for example who is making calls, to which regions and how many in a given period in order to analyse how productive they might be. It can be useful to compare people’s performance as it may be that some staff are making many call but few sales and someone else is making fewer calls but more sales. So ultimately it is relative to the needs of the organisation and their business objectives.