Measurement in call centre performance is changing rapidly with a focus solely on efficiency measures being replaced by new measures that reflect how the organisation is serving the customer better and also inspiring loyalty from staff. Since call centres were first invented back in the 1990s - much has been written about the need to focus on efficiency measures, such as call duration, alongside effectiveness measures such as conversion rate and first time fix.
Having the right focus
Take award winning contact centre British Gas for example. They changed their historic focus on a raft of sales and efficiency KPIs and replaced them with a single focus - customer advocacy.
Watch the videocast on call centre metrics featuring John Connolly, Head of Innovations at British Gas Premier Energy to find out how they made these changes.
Some fresh thinking on performance
So a new perspective is now emerging – one that balances the customer need, the agent wellbeing and the wider organisational objectives.
1. Customer Experience Customer experience can be measured by obtaining customer feedback at every stage of the customer journey. For the contact centre this could mean some combination of:
Mystery Shopping
Implementing post call surveys
Adopting Customer Advocacy – where the primary KPI is a measure that tests whether the customer would recommend the organisation to friends and family.
2. Agent Experience It is a truism that you will only achieve high level of customer satisfaction if you have employees who are engaged and motivated to achieve this outcome. So in order to ensure employee wellbeing, the approach to measuring the agent experience should be based on the following principles:
Regular feedback - at least daily reporting on performance at an agent level supported by a culture where information is shared and the results are acted upon
Changing the mindset of staff to understand “what good looks like” from a customer perspective
Recognising the importance in the role of team leaders to support staff through any cultural change transformation
3. Stakeholder Experience The third element to consider in call centre performance is the wider stakeholder impact. The modern contact centre should not exist in a silo – instead it should be joined up to the rest of the organisation. In addition to overall customer satisfaction, the business issues that matter when considering this wider perspective are to understand the costs and value that the contact centre provides.
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