If you said, “thresholds are a strip of wood, metal, or stone forming the bottom of a doorway”, well…. you’d technically be right, but we're not talking about that kind of threshold. No, we're talking about time (or count) thresholds as they relate to inbound calls in your call center. These are pre-planned values that are used as part of key performance indicators (KPIs) to benchmark against internally, and ideally to trigger operational processes or employment of resources to positively influence the overall delivery of customer experience.

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Why Call Center Thresholds Matter

These threshold levels can be very important in assessing a contact center’s service level. At the most basic level, we all know what happens when calls take too long to be answered, right? They hang up. Thresholds in this example can be set up around your longest wait time in queue for your current interaction to help ensure a minimal amount of calls/customer interactions go unanswered before a predetermined amount of time passes, and they are abandoned.

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When used properly, thresholds can be a fairly accurate early indicator of when calls are likely to be abandoned. The key is having the tools to analyze, continually, if your thresholds continue to make sense. Is it a threshold that is helping to keep abandoned calls to a minimum? Brightmetrics™ services can help you leverage your data to determine when thresholds should be set and adjusted to make sure calls are answered before the average call is abandoned.

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What About The Customer?

Another way to think about thresholds is from the perspective of your customer: Thresholds are great when used as a KPI, but ultimately, they are there to ensure a better experience for your customers.

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They should trigger interventions within your contact center to minimize wait time, ensure the right skilled resources available for your call volume to certain skilled queues, etc. Remember, if a call waits too long, it likely means worse than an increment against your Abandon Rate... it more likely translates to a lost opportunity, sale, or future mutually beneficial relationship with that customer.

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How About An Example?

You’re a contact center manager. It’s been a busy Monday morning and you are constantly putting out fires. You look away from your dashboards to answer some emails or talk to a coworker. Your team is busy, and the calls are coming in faster than they can be answered, we’ve all been there. You’re quickly approaching your configured threshold limits and there’s a chance you miss the visual warnings and alerts that are telling you something is wrong.

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Fortunately, with Brightmetrics you’re able to configure audio alerts besides the visual alerts that tell you when calls are approaching your threshold. This will allow you and your team to proactively manage and redistribute workloads to get the calls answered before you exceed your service levels.

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But Wait, There's More!

And if you’re a REAL TIME Analytics™ dashboard user, thresholds can play a pivotal role in how you provide top-notch customer service. If you’re trying to deliver the best experience for your customers, it’s likely that your dashboards are the first thing you look at in the morning and the last thing you see before you leave; your eyes are always on them.

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And because we know you’re busy and want your data easily digestible, thresholds can be configured to be highlighted in On-Demand Reports in a visual format so you can quickly see the calls that exceeded the predetermined threshold and why it might have happened.

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