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Finding an Easy Formula to Do the Math is a Challenge for Contact Centers
When you google “contact center metrics,” there’s no
shortage of suggestions to peruse. Lists of varying numbers of suggested metrics
to be monitored pop up on the screen: 7, 13, 20, 27. But which are the right ones for a company’s
specific environment? The across-the-board metric cited is First Contact
Resolution (FCR), which is a standard that just about every contact center
views as critical to maintain and improve.
Similarly, Customer Satisfaction ratings, while not always quite as
simple to define, are also a universal target to be monitored.
But it gets murkier from there. Many other commonly cited
metrics, such as service level or average handle time, are not always directly
comparable across channels; and evaluating teams that share some -- but not all
-- queues is not always a precise process. An ICMI study revealed that 39% of contact
center leaders struggle to identify and measure key performance indicators.
A deeper understanding of metrics and how to calculate them
helps a business set the right targets and reach goals to support its mission
and vision. Each measure used to help determine how teams are performing needs
to be understandable and actionable to individual agents, supervisors and
management alike. When all parties agree
on what is important, a company can consistently track performance and see
where to improve processes and training to help its agents do better.
Having this level of clarity on goals and metrics and knowing
how they’re tracking towards those goals, creates employees who are more
engaged with their work and empowered in their roles. A Dale Carnegie
infographic shows that companies with more engaged employees outperform
companies without engaged employees by 202%,
and have customer retention rates that are 18% higher,
according to loyalty strategy research by Colloquy.
Setting goals to measure performance can be somewhat tricky.
Targets should not be so difficult to attain as to make them daunting for
agents. There must be flexibility and compromise in determining how to balance
between goals that appear to compete with one another, such as average handle
time – where saving and time and reducing cost is paramount – and customer
satisfaction, especially in cases that involve more complex interactions. When
creating scoreboards to measure agent performance, businesses need to ensure
that goals are instantly comprehensible and ready to act upon. They also need
to make sense mathematically in tracking drivers across all contact channels including
traditional, social, and mobile. It’s
helpful to use the same classification system across all interactions and equip
agents to use it consistently.
Of course, simply knowing which metrics to use and how to
score them is not the be-all, end-all for optimizing agent happiness. Going
back to Google, one would find an astounding 147,000+ results for “benefits of
a happy contact center agent”. The major areas of focus in these listings range
from the obvious: “why agent satisfaction is important,” to the ubiquitous “fun
things to do to keep agents happy” and the more specific evaluations of
software and services to promote agent satisfaction.
Companies must be proactive in their approach to building
models that are consistently accurate in predicting probabilities and outcomes
in their contact centers. Models that are less than precise lead to failure to
maintain desired service levels and result in cost overages. Businesses need to
find innovative but proven methods to calculate the proper variables and the
right things to look for in developing analyses that result in accurate
forecasts.
Data abundance and complex operations make it challenging to
develop, implement, and present clean, clear reports and on-target analyses.
Over the next several months, agent-first solution provider Sharpen
Technologies, developers of an always-on contact center platform built for the
enterprise, will present a comprehensive series of complimentary webcasts on
CrmXchange.
The four sessions are designed to demystify the process of
determining the right metrics, show businesses how to measure and accurately
analyzing contact center performance, and to implement those analyses across
the operation so the entire organization stays focused on excellence. It will
culminate in a discussion of how to put together the most efficacious math
models for contact center executives and managers to glean actionable insights.
The first webcast in the series, “Attributesof Solid Contact Center Performance Metrics - and Attributes of Poor Ones” was held on Thursday, March 5.
The second,” Learn
How to be Great: Helping Agents, Supervisors, and Execs Perform,” was presented on Tuesday, April 21.
The third session, “Setting Performance Goals and Scorecards,”
comes up on Thursday, August 13.
The final presentation “Building
Great “What-If” Models and the Resulting Analyses for the CEO” will be
delivered on Tuesday, October 20.
All webcasts will be jointly presented by Ric Kosiba, Chief
Data Scientist and Adam Settle. Chief Product Officer, Sharpen Technologies.
Ric’s vast background of expertise goes back two decades to Bay Bridge
Decisions Technologies which he co-founded in 2000. In that role, he developed
the contact center industry’s first “what if” decision engine, a complex set of
algorithms designed to forecast proper staffing levels. Adam is an experienced
education professional skilled in Sales, Coaching, Team Building, and Training.
He combines his extensive knowledge with hands-on experience as a trainer at
Apple and Angie’s List.
Register now at no
cost for the individual
presentations or the complete series. Each webcast is at 1:00PM ET. If you
cannot attend the live presentation, a link to the recorded session will be
available within 24 hours.