Call Centre KPI
To achieve excellence in your contact centre you need to have three things in place – engaged staff; a true customer focus; and a clear vision of what success looks like. The call centre KPI measures that you use have an important role to play in balancing these people, customer and strategy levers.
When we visit call centres - whether that is as judges for Awards schemes or as consultants for our clients - too often we find that KPIs are just pulled off the shelf without any thought as to the impact they have on each other, the customer and the well being of staff.
Remembering that customers can immediately vent their frustration at organisations who fall short in Customer Service via the many Social Media outlets that now exist, then bad news can now travel very quickly indeed. The impact on contact centres operators is the need to look at the mechanics of how KPIs are designed and how these targets are set.
Poorly designed KPI metrics have the power to create stress, poor customer interactions and increase running costs in any call centre operation – however large or small. It is certainly true that KPI’s drive agent behaviour, so careful thought and consideration needs to go into having a balance of measures – that reflect effectiveness as well as efficiency.
Design your KPI’s around your customer strategy
In 2008/09, Genesys Communications conducted a worldwide survey to examine how adept organisations have become at aligning corporate strategy with the role of the contact centre. The survey found that, of the 900 companies polled, only 42% described their contact centre as strategic, with 58% seeing the contact centre as purely operational.
When it came to the KPI performance metric that they used, the highest scoring response was Customer Satisfaction at 70%. However, the majority of metrics used in today’s contact centres reflected a more operational focus - with 68% measuring call duration and 67% measuring Average Speed to Answer.
Contrast these survey findings with what we see as the attributes of excellent Award winning centres. In 2009, we were part of the judging panel that awarded British Gas Premier Energy in Cardiff the overall winner of the European Contact Centre Awards. They had achieved a significant culture change away from being a sales centre towards becoming a customer advocacy centre. The historic KPIs that they had used – such as conversion rates and calls per agent per day – were removed, to be replaced by a single focus on customer advocacy. They adopted Net Promoter Score (NPS) as the output measure and deployed leading edge technology to change the way that quality was managed – focusing just on those cases that did not meet NPS thresholds. The outcome was that not only did advocacy improve but, as a consequence of better meeting customer needs, key input metrics such as AHT and attrition also moved in the right direction.
A call to action
As customer expectation becomes more sophisticated and informed, organisations need to adapt by creating balanced KPI scorecards that can meet that expectation.
Contact Centre performance management needs to reflect this change in strategy so that the measures are less operationally focused and more customer oriented. The KPIs used then become more relevant and connected so that contact centres have the opportunity to make strategic improvements that will quickly reduce cost, improve efficiency, and at the same time increase customer loyalty and agent well being.
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