In this series we will look at some useful tips for contact centre management, as seen by our work in the Australian contact centre industry. They are not presented in any particular order.
This article is the fourth of nine articles in the series.
Focus on the Right Metrics
Almost anything in a contact centre can be measured. In fact, metrics in a contact centre can become a cottage industry of their own. All those tables of numbers, statistics, pretty colourful graphs, monthly board reports that run into tens of pages and lots of detail, wallboards with all sorts of displays for all to see. It is all worthwhile, right? I mean – all these numbers show how hard we are working and what great service we are providing, right?
Wrong.
Many people outside the contact centre do not understand contact centre metrics. In fact many contact centre managers don’t understand all the metrics available to them. Or, they understand the metric but not the reason – or how to effect change. For example, there is a wide variance in average talk time between (apparently similar) staff members, but why does this happen? The complex metrics are useful for contact centre manager to identify issues and make changes and improvements that affect the higher level measures that senior staff are usually interested in.
Before you send any more reports out, talk to the recipient of the reports and find out exactly what they want, then provide that and only that. Senior management and boards generally want simplicity and are only interested in 2 or 3 key metrics – value of sales for the month, costs for the month, Net Promoter Score or customer satisfaction score, staff forecasts, and that is about all. All other metrics contribute to these, but are for the contact centre manager to use to achieve these goals. They are too specialised for senior management who usually don’t want reasons, just the impact to the business.
Review and simplify your reporting, cull any reports that aren’t required and save your time and money.
For more information please email spels@ccaction.com.au or call +61 3 8648 6577.
All previous articles are available on our web site – www.ccaction.com.au
Next article – Sell Success will be available mid-January 2016 as we are taking a short break. Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year to all our readers.