Contact Center Performance Measures - eGain

Business priorities within the contact center industry are shifting. While survival strate-gies during the economic downturn focused on cost cutting, the long climb out of the recession will require centers to closely align their strategic and operational metrics with the organization’s business objectives, and add value by improving the customer experience across channels.

Overall, organizations are beginning to recognize the opportunities that the contact center has to impact the value of the relationship with customers, says Martin Dove, global managing director for Customer Interactive Solutions at Dimension Data, a global IT solutions and service provider.

“While there continues to be a strong focus on cost containment, it’s being complemented by an uptick in the level of attention on customer lifetime value management, customer retention, acquiring new customers and the role that the contact center plays in creating value and revenue,” adds Dove, citing findings from Dimension Data’s 2009 Global Contact Center Benchmarking Report.

While many contact centers have emphasized traditional efficiency metrics to manage costs, such as average call time, wrapup time and agent utilization, two important areas of focus that have emerged from a tactical and strategic perspective are self service and process optimization, he points out.

“In the past, contact centers have taken a siloed view and only looked to amend and adjust the processes that were within their span of control. There was a much more enterprisewide view to process optimization evidenced in this year’s report, some of which is being facilitated by the deployment of enterprisewide IP telephony. Expert advisors who might sit in the

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By Susan Hash, Contact Center Pipeline

Contact Center Performance Measures

Call centers are poised to play a key role in customer retention and value, but most still rely on cost-efficiency metrics to drive performance.

www.contactcenterpipeline.com

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middle of a back office are now directly accessible as an extension connected to the same telephony platform that’s being used in the contact center. One of the by-products of the deployment of IP technology is that it’s allowing for a broader view of process management going into other parts of the enterprise.”

Contact Centers Still Focusing on the Easy Measures

On the strategic level, the majority of survey respondents reported that the top key performance indicators (KPIs) that they measure and monitor, as well as report to their executive management, are customer complaints (77.5% said they measure it; 60.5% said they report it) and customer satisfaction (77% measure; 70% report). While 61% of contact centers measured and monitored resolution rates within the contact center, less than half (45.5%) reported that KPI to senior management. Other top KPIs reported to the C-level were number of customers (57.5%), capacity (50.5%), and contacts per channel (45.5%).

On the operational and tactical side, the KPIs most frequently reported to senior-level management included the percent of calls abandoned (78.4%), percent of calls answered (73%), calls handled (70.6%) and calls offered (56.4%). The report points out that the overall strategic management informa-tion reported at the board level was still too focused on service levels, and that, across the industry, con-tact centers “are still measuring the wrong things for the wrong reasons.”

eGain CEO Ashu Roy agrees. “It always comes down to what is easy to measure vs. what should be measured,” he says. “That is a constant battle.” He points to customer feedback surveys as an example. “While, in principle, customer feedback surveys are fairly easy to implement, in the real world it takes a fair amount of work because you want to make sure that the survey goes across all channels. Yet feedback surveys often end up being siloed — or channel specific — and that does not create an accu-rate sense of customer sentiment.”

Roy points out that it’s not that contact center leaders don’t know the right thing to do, they’re just measuring the things that they can measure. In many cases, he adds,

managers don’t have the necessary tools to do a good job of measuring the effectiveness dimensions.

So what types of measures should contact centers be using? “Some people claim that contact centers should be focused almost entirely on effectiveness metrics and long-term, value-building metrics,” Roy says. “While I see the logic of that, I don’t think that it’s a very pragmatic approach, because every business has to balance effectiveness and efficiency.”

Roy recommends using metrics that balance vari-ables such as hold time. For instance, rather than tracking hold times to the half-second, use broader categories, such as very long hold times, long hold times and acceptable hold times.

Moving from average handle time (AHT) to first-call resolution (FCR) is another transition that most contact centers leaders would agree to be a more customer-focused approach, yet many are struggling to make the change. Although many contact center managers acknowledge that AHT is a productivity metric that often hampers customer satisfaction and quality, they still hold agents accountable for it.

“There is a vast disconnect between what man-agement says about AHT and what they’re doing,” says Mike Desmarais, founder and president of call center quality assurance specialists SQM Group. In a survey of 25,000 call center agents conducted last year, SQM Group found that the majority of call center employees indicated that management has conveyed — in their words and actions — that AHT is much more important than they would admit. “It was an amazing finding for us,” he says. “When you ask management if they hold their people account-able for AHT, they’ll tell you that they’re moving away from it or that it’s less of a factor. But their employees would disagree.”


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Balanced Scorecards Dilute Performance

Most contact centers use some type of balanced scorecard approach to track and manage agents’ performance. But, says Desmarais, that is a poor practice if you want to drive FCR. Why? It waters down the bonus program and, ultimately, agent per-formance. He offers this example: A typical center’s balanced scorecard approach focuses on four key KPIs for which their agents are held accountable, for instance, AHT, QA score, cross-selling/upselling and teamwork. “If you were to ask the agents whether the bonus program motivates them to change their behavior on those KPIs in any way, the vast majority would tell you that it does not. And when they get their bonus, either on a quarterly or an annual basis, they consider it as part of their base pay.”

Instead, Desmarais advocates using the traditional operational metrics, such as AHT, as qualifiers to the bonus, and using more customer-focused metrics like call resolution and customer satisfaction as the payout for the bonus.

“Move away from the balanced scorecard and develop a more focused approach in terms of what you’re going to measure your agents on,” Desmarais says. “The bottom line is that you’re paying agents for their customer satisfaction and call resolution performance, but in order for them to be eligible to receive that bonus, they have to perform the qualifier metrics like AHT at a certain level.”

He also recommends using a bonus distribution approach by which the payout is skewed toward the high-performing agents. For instance, a quartile system in which the top-quartile agents receive $4K bonus payout, second- and third-quartile performers may receive $2K or $1K, and the bottom quartile receives no bonus. “In our experience, when clients have shifted their bonus system to this approach, their call resolution performance improves immedi-ately. It can increase up to 10 points within the first 30 days,” says Desmarais. “We’ve never experienced any technology effort, any process improvement or any quality assurance program that has had that type of significant impact.”

Increase in Contact Center Multifunctionality

Although companies are recognizing the poten-tial of their contact centers to add value to the bot-tom line, the challenge will be to break down the

operational silos that still exist in many organizations.Take, for instance, customer lifetime value man-

agement, which is ranked third among the top mar-keting trends affecting the contact center, according to the Dimension Data report. “But when you drill down into the marketing or CRM-type capabilities that exist within the organization, there are still some challenges,” says Dove. Key among those are the ability to measure and use customer lifetime value and customer profitability — which only 10% of respondents indicated that they did. But the major-ity are not connected with the other parts of the organization that can provide the contact center with the ability to measure and use that data at the operational level.

The report also found that approximately 45% of respondents claim to have multifunctional capability in the call center, such as providing service and some type of sales or marketing function, says Dove. When asked whether or not the contact center had defined processes in place to enable agents to identify sales opportunities through some type of trigger, 60% indicated that they did (compared with 50% last year). Of that 60%, 17% are automated and 43% are on a manual process.

“While there does seem to be more of an overlap between the service and sales and marketing func-tions, it’s still very reliant on manual intervention — Post-it notes and bits of paper stuck on agents’ cubicles to remind them of what those processes are — rather than being embedded into the service process,” Dove says.

Align Performance Across ChannelsThere has been a significant increase this year in

consumer preferences for using Web self-service as the first touchpoint with an organization when seek-ing customer service, says Dove. Fifty-two percent of 16- to 34-year-olds said they would use online self-service as their first port of call before thinking of picking up the phone, compared with 37% of the 51-plus age group.

“That is a clear sign that the way in which organi-zations integrate their channels and provide continu-ity and consistency across those channels is going to become much more important,” Dove says. “Both from an operation and a technology perspective, the need to provide context when someone does decide to pick up the phone is critical. Increasingly, the reason for picking up the phone is going to




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Susan Hash is the Editor of Contact Center Pipeline.

[email protected] 206-922-2064

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First-call resolution. FCR is the measure that matters the most, Desmarais says. “FCR is the metric that most highly correlates to both CSR and call center customer satisfaction. It drives quality, and drives down costs.”

Five Call Center Metrics Your Senior Execs Should Understand

World-class call certification (WCC). WCC is a metric that SQM Group developed, which is comprised of three measures: How satisfied customers are with their call center experience; how satisfied customers are with the agent; and whether or not the call was resolved. Importantly, WCC is based on customers’ judgment of their experiences and not the organization’s. “If 75% of a contact center’s customers experience the top box for all three metrics, then we would consider that contact center to be world class,” he says. “The WCC metric encompasses quality and cost. As long as agents can resolve the call, it’s lowering your cost, and if customers are satisfied, it drives the quality component.”

Revenue protection statement. This can be broken down into how much revenue the contact center is responsible for, how much revenue the center lost, and how much revenue the center protected. How is it tracked? “We ask the customer whether or not the call was resolved, and then, based on their call center experience, how likely is it that they will continue to do business with the organization,” Desmarais explains. “If they say that, as a result of their call center experience, they will no longer do business with the organization, then that is revenue that the center lost.”

Cost per call resolution. What does it cost you to resolve the customer’s call? “This metric builds on cost per call,” he says. “Basically, if your cost per call is $5, but on average, it takes you one and a half times to resolve the customer’s call, then your cost per call resolution is $7.50.”

Agent utilization. While there are a variety of formulas for agent utilization, Desmarais recommends the following: Number of calls per day times talk time and wrapup time divided by the hours that the agent works.

How can you demonstrate the value of your contact center to senior executives? SQM Group’s Mike Desmarais offers the following five metrics — all of which are centered around cost and quality — which the C-level should understand about your operation.

be because the consumer couldn’t get what they wanted on another channel. If the agent doesn’t have the context of what the person was trying to do on the other channel, it’s going to exacerbate the problem of having a broken process.”

However, the ability to provide that consistent service experience across channels is still in the early adopter stage, says eGain’s Roy.

“More companies are becoming aware that what they are delivering through their phone-based centers should be consistent with what they are sharing with customers on the Web, and what they provide through e-mail or chat service,” he says. “The multichannel experience requires a migration or evolution from a siloed environment to more of a platform environment or an integrated backend.”


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Contact Center Performance Measures - eGain