Creating and Communicating the Value of the Call Center (Part 2)

As I mentioned in Part 1 of this four-part series, most call center leaders find themselves spending several hours a week “defending” the metrics, and are often on a quests to make this task go away.  Prevention starts with educating everyone in the organization and creating an understanding of what these measures really mean and how they’re calculated.   Think about a brick and mortar retail environment; they advertise that the doors will be open for business during a certain time period, and ensure that people can get in during that time. That’s really no different than your contact center availability objectives – you’re basically measuring if you had the door open for people when you said you would.  The difference is that you’re managing it by interval several times a day; if you only look at it by the day, you could actually have the door closed for half the day and extra doors open the other half. The former is bad for the customer, and the latter adds cost to the company.- and neither adds any value to the organization.

 

In a call center, we often try to make the numbers look better by throwing more bodies at the low accessibility numbers in the afternoon – these are often the bodies we pay the most for (supervisors, senior reps, etc.) and are, in almost every case, unnecessary and detract from the things that add real customer and organizational value.  When you see an accessibility score recorded for a call center, it means it has already happened, and for those customers that were part of the score, there is nothing you can do to fix their experience.  

 

The key is to focus on the drivers of the score.  The best contact centers have an ongoing planning focus, and the scores provide insight on new ways to improve the plan – from both the contact center’s and customer’s prospective. These environments focus little attention on historical results, and pour their energy in ensuring that they have near-term and long-term plans in place to help improve future scores.

 

Below is an example of a way to help your contact center learn to view  accessibility scores for what they really are – interval metrics that must be balanced.  It also provides a quick way to understand the drivers of success: Did we get the right number of calls? Did agents do what we expected (adherence)? And did something about the process cause the handle time to be more or less than normal?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The goal is to get everyone who evaluates scores to begin thinking about ways to prevent problems from happening in the future, and to focus on the interval treatment of customers and on how much time the company took from them. Once you’ve got this in place, you can reduce the reliance on complex spreadsheets by combining your intervals with the results – focusing on how many intervals of the day you were successful.  Looking at it this way provides internal and external leaders with a much clearer view of daily success, along with an understanding that the center is focused on planning for future improvements vs. trying to over-analyze what when wrong. 

 

Below is an example of how to take the spreadsheet above and summarize it in a way that provides single leadership metrics with complete leadership visibility:

 

82% of the intervals within the service level objective

86% of the intervals within the average speed of answer objective

89% of the intervals within the answer rate objective

82% of the intervals within the abandon rate objective

79% of the intervals within the call forecast objective

50% of the intervals within the AHT forecast objective

90% of the intervals within the agent adherence objective

Get more, including Free web seminars and articles at http://www.servicelevelgroup.com/