Author:  Roger Sumner

When I meet with customers, we often spend time talking about various contact center-related business issues they are encountering. Sometimes, a common theme emerges. Today, I have one to share with you.  There seems to be an across-the-board, genuine interest in the notion of a broader measure resulting from contact center metrics, which can be better leveraged in the board room as the true effectiveness of the call center asset. 

Your contact center may have already implemented call routing solutions, outbound dialers and performance optimization products, such as campaign management or quality monitoring, without a real strategy for making the most of the wealth of information that these products can provide. Believe me.  You’re not alone.

Deploying the right tools – workforce management, performance management, and quality management – is only the first part of the equation. You then need to use these tools to develop a structured process that allows you to improve overall contact center performance against key business metrics, and ultimately helps you achieve your corporate objectives. 

Developing successful processes requires that you truly understand your contact center metrics and how those metrics relate to other business data.  Then you have to be able to map that data into the Key Business Indicators that reflect your company’s overall business strategy  and financial goals.  Once that is understood, you will have the business metrics that allows every member of the call center team to see how they contribute to the overall success of the business.  For example, if your company wants to increase profitability by 20 percent, decrease operating costs by 10 percent, and improve customer retention rates by eight percent, you should translate these high-level objectives into operational metrics such as Revenue Per Call, Schedule Compliance, Service Level or Agent Quality Scores in order to ultimately drive success across your sales, collections, and customer service processes.  You can then use these operational metrics to develop long-term benchmarks that will enable you create alignment and accountability within your contact center and provide yourself and your C-level executives with comprehensive views of agent and overall performance.

How do you measure success if your contact center is strategic to your business?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 12th, 2007 at 8:00 am and is filed under Contact Center Technology, Performance Optimization, WFM. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.