Module 1 - How to determine what to
measure in your call center
Download a printable version of this tutorial in PDF format
 We will now provide our
weekly tutorials in a
downloadable PDF format so you are able to view and print them
as resources. Depending on the topic of the tutorial, you might
choose to provide it as a handout with your team, business
leaders or employees.
We will also continue to provide the tutorials in html format as
found below.
The Call Center Learning Center is excited to announce
a new "how to" tutorial series for call center managers and supervisors. This tutorial series will pull from Prosci's research-based toolkits and best practices reports. This module
provides guidelines on how to determine what to measure in your call
center. Module 2 will address how to minimize misdirected contacts
to your center. Module 3 will focus on how to increase the
percentage of calls resolved in one contact. Module 4 will help you learn how to give
effective feedback from quality monitoring. Module 5 will conclude
the series with how to determine selection criteria for a technology
vendor.
Setting contact center goals for success
The best contact centers have established
goals based on business needs that everyone works towards.
Goals help you determine what success means to your organization -
otherwise you won't know it when you get there. Is it happy
customers? Lots of sales? First contact resolution?
Establishing goals and assessing performance is an ongoing process
that defines how well the center is doing over
time. Exactly what gets measured varies from center to
center. It's based on those big-picture objectives identified in
your call center's strategy.
Setting goals and measures, creating associated reports, and
analyzing data are all things that take time and money that you can't
afford to waste. The following guidelines will help you select the
most important areas to measure.
Establishing appropriate measures for your environment
When determining call center measurements and goals, you
must always keep in mind three important concepts:
- What do my customers need?
- What are the business needs?
- How do we stay competitive in the industry?
Figure 1 illustrates how to determine what measures to use based on
what is most important to your call center.
Figure 1 - Determining what to measure in your call center
KPI categories and goals
Upon determining the appropriate measures for your center's
priorities, you should identify at least one or two key performance indicators (KPIs)
in each of the following areas:
-
Operational efficiency (focused
on operational costs)
-
Operational productivity (if
applicable for you center, focused on revenue generation)
-
Service quality and customer
satisfaction (focused on customers' experience)
-
Employee satisfaction
(focused on your most important resources)
Consider the following questions when setting specific goals for your
call center's performance:
Contact length and channel (operational
efficiency)
- How long do calls last (handle time)?
- How long does it take to compose an email response? Fax?
Text chat?
- Will customer service suffer if short contact lengths are
targeted?
- Can redistribute voice contact to lower cost media (for
example, IVR)?
Revenue generation (operational
productivity)
- What is the goal for the take rate (percent of contacts
resulting in sales or revenue generation)?
- What is the overall revenue goal?
- What products and services are targeted for upsell and
cross-sell?
- What is the number of outbound contacts expected per agent
per day?
Customer contact issues (service quality)
- What will be the definition of a quality contact?
- What customer satisfaction goals will be targeted and how
will they be measured?
- Will customer satisfaction goals conflict with other
targets, such as average handle time?
- When will a contact be considered resolved?
- What is the best metric for quality monitoring to assess
overall service quality?
Employee work issues (employee
satisfaction)
- How do we define employee satisfaction?
- What non-contact activities will be supported by the center
(e.g., training, project work)?
- What occupancy rate is targeted to balance efficiency and
employee satisfaction?
- What is the overall turnover objective for the center?
Next steps
After you have selected the appropriate performance measures for your
center, set performance targets based on your customer and benchmarking
data. Once the measures are in place, periodically
revisit and refine them to ensure
they are realistic and
driving the right behavior. An
effective performance measurement system is an ongoing process that
identifies successful performance as well as areas for improvement.
A valuable resource to help you improve performance measures is the Call Center Measurement
Toolkit. It provides a complete, alphabetized guide to performance
measurement that is easy to understand and easy to implement. Each
measurement area includes complete definitions, common mis-uses of
terms, how to compute each measurement area for your call center, goal
setting tips and recommendations for improving performance in the each
area.
As for benchmarking, Call Center
Best Practices - Operations Edition provides benchmarks of 10 key
performance measures based on data collected from 240 companies from
over 50 countries. The benchmarking data will help you see how
your call center's goals and performance measure up against other call
centers in your industry.
|
