Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Is Your Contact Center Emphasizing the Right Metrics?
As the old saying goes, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” This is especially true in the fast-paced contact center environment when mistakes can have far-reaching effects before they are even discovered, and customer service quality can be negatively affected by one bad transaction.
Most contact centers measure metrics in order to set a bar for performance. There are many different types of metrics, however, and they are not all created equal. Some exist solely for the benefit of the contact center, while others are more customer-centric. It’s critical for contact centers to measure against the metrics that most lead to quality interactions. According to a recent blog post by Impact Learning’s John Castaldi, this is where many organizations run into problems.
“While measuring customer service is necessary and good, customer service managers would benefit themselves and their customers if they reviewed their metrics against two common flaws,” he wrote.
Quantity over Quality
Many call centers use quantitative metrics such as average handle time too heavily, which can lead to agents rushing customers off the phone before the customers’ transactions are finished in order to “hit their numbers.” This leads to customer dissatisfaction and multiple callbacks, which in the long run harm the contact center’s performance.
An over-reliance on productivity (efficiency) measures, and an underweighting of quality (effectiveness) measures will drive your performance in the wrong direction,” wrote Castaldi. “It is important to track how many tickets are handled; how many cases are closed – valid quantitative measures. However… revenue growth and customer retention are triggered by customer satisfaction – a quality measure.”
Contact centers should focus more on qualitative metrics such as first-call resolution and net promoter scores rather than speed-related metrics such as average handle time.
Conflicting Metrics
Castaldi cites a case study example of a computer company that spent millions on a knowledgebase system that was to be populated with material that would encourage customers to find their own information. The theory was that customer support representatives would take the time to populate this knowledgebase with their own insight and knowledge in the form of articles, and this would lead to the creation of a valuable customer self-help resource.
“However, the main metric remained case productivity – number of cases closed per agent,” wrote Castaldi. “The new behavior (writing articles) would actually be punished with lower case productivity scores. The metrics were not adjusted to support the desired behavior.”
Before you implement or overhaul a metrics plan, ask yourselves a few questions: are these metrics for the benefit of our company or our customers? Do they conflict with one another? Have we put too much emphasis on rushing customers off the phone? Are we punishing agents for really helping customers? Do we want to work towards short-term goals or long-term goals? It’s important to remember that metrics that will improve long-term goals – and improvement in customer satisfaction, for example – may affect quantity metrics in the short-term. It’s a small price to pay for long-term gains.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi