How to Choose the Right Contact Center KPIs

Creating effective and actionable KPIs

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How to Choose the Right Contact Center KPIs
Contact CentreInsights

Published: March 22, 2022

CX Today Team

Contact centers must measure performance from the perspective of customers, agents, and the business. These are their three critical stakeholders.

Customer KPIs often trickle down from the business strategy and vision. For example, suppose the company aspires to be “easy to do business with”. In that case, contact centers are likely to track KPIs such as customer effort, first contact resolution (FCR), and self-service success rates. Other departments should share similar customer KPIs, inspiring mutual targets and increased collaboration.

Agent KPIs ensure that the contact center team is performing well, engaged, and happy. People are the lifeblood of an organization, and providing a positive culture will also influence critical customer and business objectives. As such, metrics such as agent attrition, quality scores, and engagement rates are essential for leaders to keep a close eye on.

Finally, business KPIs ensure that the contact center maximizes revenues while improving customer and agent experiences. Much of this comes down to the performance of the WFM team, which will likely measure service level performance, forecast accuracy, and abandon rates. Yet, other KPIs such as cost per call, system downtime, and operating expenses are also critical considerations.

By breaking contact center KPIs down across these three areas and into a real-time dashboard, leaders can make the best-informed decisions throughout the day.

KPIs Stem from Strategy

The c-suite mandates particular KPIs. Typically, these include a north star metric – such as Net Promoter Score (NPS) – and financial KPIs. However, most are the choices of the contact center director and the resource planning team.

Unfortunately, as the contact center evolves, many of these KPIs become redundant. Yet, managers keep measuring them without any real reason, wasting time. Instead, it is better to go back to the basics and only focus on those that inform contact center decisions.

An excellent way to do this is to note the most critical contact center objectives. From this, contact center leaders may highlight success factors, pinpoint goals, and create a set of relevant KPIs. The result is that every leader then understands the significance of when one KPI rises or falls.

Also, the contact center can set benchmarks against critical KPIs. Consequently, when a KPI falls below that benchmark, they understand that they must act. These benchmarks are also excellent for measuring progress and goal achievement.

Creating Actionable KPIs

Contact centers often mismeasure KPIs. Most frequently, this is through misunderstandings of how to calculate it. For example, many contact centers measure it through repeat calls, but this often is not a true reflection of FCR rates, as customers often call back with a new query.

However, sometimes contact center leaders feel the pressure and deliberately report KPIs inappropriately and find ways to skew results. For example, in one contact center, a team leader made a succession of one-second calls to their department to bring down its average handling time (AHT).

Perhaps this may seem an extreme example. Yet, these situations are commonplace, and it is crucial that contact centers are clear about how they measure KPIs. Sticking to the SMART – Specific, Measurable, Accurate, Relevant, Timebound – acronym helps, enabling valid measurement and informing better business decisions.

For more detail regarding specific customer KPIs, read our article: 5 Important Metrics for Customer Satisfaction

 

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