Study Released on Domestic Call Centers

Todd Cardin of Specialty Answering Service has just completed an eight month study on the future of traditional telephone answering services in the United States.

In a time when it appears that every time you call a credit card company, a computer service center or even a bank you reach an operator located overseas. These situations are often very frustrating but more and more Americans are getting used to speaking to a CSR who has not yet grasped the language.

The fast increase and development of call centers in countries like India and the Philippines has put an extraordinary amount of pressure on domestic call center operations. The wages of employees in these other countries can be 50% to 80% less than the employees of the United States; this is why many companies are using call centers located overseas. Even though the wage difference is huge between the United States and their overseas competitors, there are new factors causing the call centers of the United States to become more attractive.

To test how a domestic call center would stack up against an overseas operation, Cardin tested and scripted out the same calls and placed and recorded calls in some of his United States operations and a call center located in India. Cardin used eight of his specialized telephone answering services. The services used were Cardin’s Mental Health Answering Service, Limousine Answering Service, Restoration Answering Service, Medtas, Restaraunt Repair Answering Service, Website Receptionist, Contractors Answering Service and Plumbers Choice. Over five hundred different calls were placed between all of Cardin’s services and the same calls were placed overseas. All of the accounts were created by Cardin’s staff and placed by actors and actresses from ETC Theater www.etctheater.com.

There are many standard traffic measurements that can be performed on a call center to determine its performance levels. In his study, Cardin consider the folowing measures:

• The average delay a caller may experience whilst waiting in a queue.

• The mean conversation time, otherwise referred to as Average Talk Time.

• The mean dealing time, otherwise referred to as Average Handling Time,

• The number of calls / inquiries per hour an agent handles.

• The amount of time spent while an agent processes customer requests while not speaking to a customer.

• The percentage of calls which completely resolve the customer’s issue.

The percentage of calls where a customer hangs up or abandons the call is often referred to as Total Calls Abandoned or Percentage of calls abandoned. Calls are often abandoned due to long hold times when a call centre experiences a high call volume.

Percentage of time agents spend not ready to take calls, often referred to as Idle Time. Quality Assurance monitored by a quality assurance team.

In each measure, Todd Cardin www.toddcardin.org found that the domestic, or United States call centers scored considerably more favorable scores. The average amount of time spent on a call by the United States operators were less than half of that spent on the call by their overseas counterparts. Cardin found the study to support the future of United States call centers.