Could Your Metrics Work Harder?

Paul White explains how to drive great performance by making the best use of your contact centre metrics.

Call centre metrics has always been a well-discussed topic in the industry. However, despite the large amount of industry research and advice available, contact centres are still struggling to really understand what metrics they should be using and how to create actionable insight to improve performance.

As customer demand rapidly increases and more and more pressure is being put on businesses to improve their customer service levels, managers are starting to turn to metrics to better understand contact centre performance.

Whilst many contact centres do measure performance, they often don’t explore further than one or two main metrics such as Average Handling Time (AHT) and First Contact Resolution (FCR), leading to gathering data that doesn’t provide them with the holistic view they need in order to understand and improve performance.

Look at KPIs to understand what you want to achieve

The reality is there is no straightforward answer to what metrics contact centres should be using as there is no “one size fits all” approach. Instead, contact centres should be using a staged approach, with the first step being to look at their business objectives and call centre KPIs to really gain an understanding in to what it is they are trying to achieve and consequently what it is that needs to be measured.

Managers need to gain an in-depth understanding in to how different departments across the business are interlinked and how metrics in one department can be to the detriment of the end-to-end process and overall business performance.

For example, if a contact centre is measuring AHT to understand the efficiency of its agents, but this not cross-referenced to other metrics such as FCR, which measures quality of performance, the outcomes may impact other departments, such as repeat business in the sales department and customer retention.

Decide which metrics provide a holistic view of your organisation

While an individual metric does have a value, it is best not to focus on one. Instead, businesses should select a combination of task-related (e.g. AHT and Sales Volume) and performance-related metrics (e.g. NPS and Customer Effort) that support the overall business objectives.

Therefore, the second stage is to decide which metrics work together to provide a holistic view of the organisation, across multiple departments, to measure the objectives defined in stage one.

Once the business knows what metrics they want to implement, collecting the data is quite straightforward. However, extracting value from it is another thing entirely.

Bring your data together and analyse it

Step three in the process is about bringing together a broad range of data sets from across different departments, analysing them cost-effectively and then delivering the results to where they can be most useful. Whilst many contact centres collect an abundance of data, it is often left as a spreadsheet for monthly reports without any true meaning being extracted from it.

The most important part of the process, and the step many contact centres miss out, is to really analyse the data and understand what is being collected. The whole purpose of using metrics in a business is to understand current performance in order to continually improve future performance. Managers therefore need to systematically analyse the data and break it down in to actionable insights to add value and improve performance across all areas of the business.

Once a business has mastered the three-step process, it is vital to communicate the results to the wider team in order to drive positive change and for agents and other employees to understand what the business is trying to achieve and how.

With thanks to Paul White at mplsystems