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As a contact center manager, do you ever feel like managing contact center performance is like trying to keep several balls in the air at once?
Regardless of whether you manage your company’s contact center key performance indicators (KPIs), service levels (SLs), or service level agreements (SLAs), you need to know what to measure and why.
Most new contact center employees spend as much time learning the language of the call center as they do learning new applications, especially when you consider terms your company created or applications specific to your industry. Once you learn what all your apps do, the next step is to understand what they measure.
If you’ve been tasked with finding better ways to measure success, don’t despair. Here are five steps that come in handy when you’re looking for better ways to measure performance, or if you want to know how to benchmark your success against others in your industry:
Step 1: Find an owner and sponsor for contact center KPIs in your organization
The biggest challenge for many projects is having a single owner that will set performance management metrics, measure them, report back and improve them year over year. The ideal owner understands the business, has a pulse on customer needs and can support senior managers within your organization.
Step 2: Decide on your most valuable metrics
Most call center performance management guidelines recommend using five to nine key metrics (seven, plus or minus two, is the golden rule). Depending on your industry or customers, you may have gaps; that’s normal. This may be a hard negotiation, but going through the group exercise to narrow down the metrics to what really matters is key.
Step 3: Turn to industry best practices if you have difficulty with metrics
Sometimes you just don’t know what you don’t know! Two great sources to help determine what you need in terms of metrics are COPC and Dimension Data. You can download the COPC standards for some great insights on what to measure here. To understand the current market and upcoming trends, watch the webinar on the Dimension Data Benchmarking Report for 2017.
Step 4: Determine you have the right tools
Now that you’ve narrowed down to your most critical KPIs, it’s time to see if you have the right tools to meet these metrics. The most important thing when deciding on a new tool is not necessarily that it has hundreds of default metrics—removing the ones that don’t specifically apply to you only adds extra work to your plate. The critical thing is that you can customize the tool to add views or metrics that are valuable to your organization. Don’t get sucked into the shiny, new features—stick to what meets your requirements and enables you to flex and grow when needed.
Clear online documentation is also helpful to understand exactly how a metric is defined, calculated and what it measures. This is also an area where online and regional support communities can answer questions and give advice.
Step 5: Don’t rest on your laurels. Review your contact center KPIs regularly
Don’t forget to review your metrics—quarterly, at a minimum—to ensure you achieve the expected results and measure what is most valuable. Interested in comparing yourself to other companies in your industry and getting a complimentary copy of the full report when it’s released? Opt to participate in the Dimension Data Contact Center Customer Experience report for the coming year.
That feeling of trying to keep all those different balls in the air may never go away, but you rest assured when you understand better how you benchmark against others in your industry, and when your confident that you’re measuring what matters most.
Want to learn more?
To hear more about call center industry analytics and best practices, I invite you to register our upcoming webinar, How to Boost Contact Center Performance & Customer Engagement with Actionable Analytics. Hope you’re able to join!
You also can request a demonstration at your convenience via https://www.genesys.com/about/demo.
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