Focus on customer-focused metrics and KPIs
At Sabio we believe that traditional contact centre metrics such as Average Handling Time are increasingly becoming a barrier to exceptional contact centre performance. It's time that organisations shifted their focus towards more relevant, customer-focused metrics and KPIs.
Of course everyone is familiar with the classic contact centre performance report –how many calls were received, how quickly they were answered and how long they lasted. There’s too much focus on statistics – perhaps that’s because measures such as AHT were the only meaningful numbers that an organisation’s ACD equipment generated?
The main issue with these kinds of average statistics is that they tend to lead to average performance levels. As a result, contact centres quickly get locked into ongoing quantitative assessments that don’t tend to move an operation forward. By concentrating on averages they are effectively hiding the performance variants that might help them to improve key factors such as overall customer service quality or agent adherence.
Instead contact centres need to start looking for those more granular metrics and KPIs that allow them to identify performance exceptions. This can help shift the focus towards more meaningful measures such as quality scores based on a sample of calls. Once these types of metrics become established, organisations can actively start to use exception-based reporting to build Balanced Scorecards featuring essential KPIs such as first contact resolution and customer feedback.
Once core operational metrics are in place, it’s also possible for contact centre managers to apply the same approach to other key parts of their operation, including customer contact history, self-service, customer feedback and agent classification. The ultimate goal would be to have a record of all contacts and self-service interactions stored within the customer record.
They say you are what you measure. We believe that if you limit your performance measurement and KPIs to the most basic record keeping and reporting, then you’re probably going to the limit the overall potential of your contact centre operation. A business that makes sure its agents are performing efficiently, that takes note of what its customers are calling about, that asks them for their feedback, pays attentions to how their brand is being discussed on social networks, and actively measures their customers’ propensity to recommend their service to others (using tools such as NPS and Customer Effort), are much more likely to be getting things right. The right measurements really can make a difference.
To find out more about how Sabio can help you improve your contact centre performance get in touch at [email protected]
