A common challenge among contact center leaders is advancing the perception of the contact center’s value within the organization. Even managers in contact centers that generate the majority of revenue for their organizations often find themselves struggling to prove the center’s worth. The search for the “secret sauce” in the contact center value recipe is the driver of many of the meaningless and distracting measures we see established in many centers.
In the contact centers I’ve led and worked with as a consultant, I’ve found myself continually reminding everyone that running contact centers is a whole lot easier than we make it. Much of the challenge is self-inflicted, and it’s often rooted in metrics and measures that seem to provide an answer to that ever-present question: How is the center adding value to the organization? A simple question, but one for which most contact center leaders fail to provide a clear and articulate response. When asked this question by someone else in the organization, a successful contact center leader is able to eloquently and accurately highlight the critical role the center plays — in a way that everyone from agent to CEO can understand.
Start with Redefining the Meaning of “The Score”
The first step in being able to form a cogent response to the previously mentioned question is to unlearn many of the common contact center missteps and make sure you have programs in place to prevent them in the future. Many of the metrics and numbers we often cite are about the center’s “availability” score – service level, average speed of answer, abandon rate, et. al. All of these are great measures, but they don’t have much to do with “value.” Nonetheless, they’re often at the top of every contact center score card, and the thing that executives frequently question. Sadly, this focus drives a continual evaluation of the scores along with ways to ensure we get the “right score” — with little focus on the drivers or an understanding of the customer impact. To gain freedom from the “score”, you’ve got to develop ways to help others understand what they’re really looking at when they see the results.
Your availability scores are the most important numbers in determining many things about your contact center – things like how many people you need by interval, how much time are you planning to take from customers before they get resolution, how much it’s going to cost you to run your business and how you perform against other organizations. Because it’s one of the main drivers to these important outcomes, they also get a tremendous amount of real-time and historical analysis. This analysis is often unnecessary, as it’s part of the plan, and done at the expense of looking for new ways to improve the experience from the customer’s perspective. For example, if you have a service level objective of 90/20 (90 percent of contacts answered in 20 seconds), and you answer every contact in exactly 21 seconds, your resulting metric is zero. A zero will typically make everyone frantic and cause them to drop everything to analyze the reasons behind it. And all of this analysis would be a complete waste of time because your customers only had 21 seconds taken from them – and, they’re not likely to complain about that.
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