Most call centers invest substantial dollars and effort on bonuses and recognition programs for customer representatives and management. However, very few call centers can empirically say that as a result of their bonus and recognition programs they have improved their customer satisfaction (Csat), employee satisfaction (Esat), call resolution (CR) or cost per resolution (CPR) performance. Based on SQM’s call center industry research, the typical customer representative’s annual bonus payout is $1,850. The annual bonus payout distribution is the following: 9% is based on Csat, 2% is based on CR, 16% quality assurance, 17% productivity, 11% sales and 45% for company profit performance indicators.

Based on SQM’s benchmarking database of over 350 call centers throughout North America, more call centers are willing use Csat performance measure to recognize (49%) customer representatives rather than use Csat performance measure for customer representative bonus payout (23%). (see table 1) A simple way of saying this is that call centers would rather give a customer representative a gift versus a financial bonus for Csat performance. The main reason why we see this practice is because many call centers do not survey customers at the customer representative level on a quota basis of 5 surveys or more a month.