When you are at home, with family or animals, silence is golden. But when you are managing a call center, silence is a killer! A production killer, that is. Most call centers will have KPI’s (key performance indicators) that include seat utilization and average handle times, but percent silence is often overlooked even though it is a metric that will help centers be more productive with fewer man hours.

You may know it as “dead air”, but percent silence is some of the easiest low-hanging fruit you can use as a call center manager to improve productivity. Let’s back up a bit before we get into causation and solutions for minimizing it.

There is always some acceptable dead air during a call. Perhaps the caller has put your representative on hold to get something that is required for the call to move forward. But most of the silence we see during calls is a peek into the window of some deeper-rooted issues such as:

  • Agents lacking confidence because they do not know the answer or the processes well enough to provide a timely response (read: insufficient training or oversight)
  • Or “hold masking” where reps don’t want you to see them putting callers on hold so they sit in silence instead.

Measuring Percent Silence

Some call centers see as many as 1 in 4 calls averaging a percent silence of 25% or higher. This is opportunity silently knocking on your doors, my friends! Reducing this by just 5% could mean an increase in productivity of over 10,000 minutes depending on how long your calls are. In addition, reps with high silence periods/dead air percentages, transfer more calls to supervisors and they end up on the attrition list – not employed by you anymore because they did not feel like they were doing a good job.

You can measure dead air/percent silence through many different channels, speech analytics solutions, transcription services or good old fashioned human QA. No matter the channel, ignoring this data can have a compounding effect on all calls in your Call Center.

Reducing Unnecessary Silence

Reducing unnecessary silence can be accomplished through additional training with your representatives and virtual receptionists.

One of the most effective methods is using mock call scenarios to show agents how to reduce the percent silence in the right way. The last thing we want is agents talking about the weather or what they did last weekend to fill dead air.

These mock call scenarios can also give way to new and potentially more efficient ways to handle specific issues. If your representatives are being slowed down by a process that can be improved, these activities can point you in the right direction to reduce total average handle time as well as percent silence.

 

Looking to learn more about our call center services? Reach out to speak with one of our account executives today. And, in the meantime, read this recent article or dig into more content on our website.