Measurement in contact centre performance is changing rapidly with a focus solely on efficiency measures being replaced by new measures that include quality monitoring, to 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
In terms of overcoming these barriers, 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
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.
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 levels 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 these 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 staff mindset to understand “what good looks like” from a customer perspective
Recognising the importance of the team leader's role 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.
Performance tools
So in order to get award winning performance, suvh as that achieved by British Gas - you need the right tools.
Genesys Performance Management delivers both real-time insight across the entire customer services organisation and the historical insight to give it long-term context. Business and operations managers and key users can see the real-time graphical metrics and Key Performance Indicators, based on their role, to identify performance and service issues as they develop and take corrective action before they affect customers and revenues.
Latest Research
Everyone knows that contact centre activities are highly measurable, using a plethora of KPIs. Yet little is known about where contact centre managers currently see themselves in the important field of performance measurement and management(PM&M) in terms of excellence on a spectrum from poor to outstanding. In 2011, we worked jointly with Alan Meekings and Simon Povey of Landmark Consulting to design and analyse a specifically tailored survey, based around Landmark Consulting’s PM&M maturity model for contact centres. A summary of our findings was that lack of budget and lack of senior management support are getting in the way of delivering improved performance management.
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