In the 21st century, the call center has evolved into a multichannel
contact center. Customers have heightened expectations of service and
frontline staffs have new demands and requirements.
As your contact center evolves, you must ask yourself if the measures
of performance that have served you well in the last decade are the
same ones that will determine how well your contact center is operating
today. This article will examine the top performance measures commonly
associated with personnel and the processes in today’s multichannel
catalog center.
We’ll take the approach of looking at metrics that supply you with
critical information related to each contact center stakeholder group.
In other words, as you think about the three main groups of people you
need to keep happy every single day, you’ll want to make sure you have
measures in place to track how well you’re satisfying each group.
The three main stakeholder groups are pretty obvious. The most
important group is, of course, is your customer base. The second group
is the senior management team. And the third group is your contact
center workforce.
We’ll explore measures of service and quality related to customers,
efficiency and profitability for senior management, and workplace and
satisfaction concerns for the frontline staff.
Service measures
Customer concerns come first, so let’s begin with some of the metrics associated with how we define service to the caller.
Blockage
Blockage is an accessibility measure that indicates what percentage of
customers will not be able to access the center at a given time due to
insufficient network facilities in place. Measures indicating blockage
(busy signals) by time of day or occurrences of “all trunks busy”
situations are utilized by most centers. Failure to include a blockage goal allows a center to always meet its
speed of answer goal by simply blocking the excess calls. This can have
a negative effect on customer accessibility and satisfaction while the
call center looks like it is doing a great job in terms of managing the
queue.
The contact center must also carefully determine the number of
facilities needed in terms of both bandwidth and email server capacity
to ensure that large quantities of emails do not overload the system.
While this provisioning is typically monitored by the IT or telecom
department and not by the contact center, it should still be a measure
that is reviewed regularly to make sure callers are not being turned
away at the front door.
Abandon rate
Call centers measure the number of abandons as well as the abandon rate since both correlate with retention and revenues. It should be noted, however, that abandon rate is not entirely under
the call center’s control. While abandons are affected by the average
wait time in queue (which can be controlled by the call center), there
are a multitude of other factors that influence this number, such as
individual caller tolerance, time of day, availability of service
alternatives, and so on. Abandon rate is not typically a measure associated with email
communications, since the email does not abandon the “queue” once it has
been sent, but it does apply to web chat interactions.
Self-service availability
More and more contacts are being off-loaded today from call center
agents to self-service alternatives. In the call center, self-service
utilization is an important gauge of accessibility and is typically
measured as an overall number, by self-service methodology and menu
points, and by time of day or by demographic group. In the contact center, self-service utilization should also be
tracked. In cases of Web chat, automated alternatives such as FAQs or
use of help functions can reduce the requirement for the live
interaction with a Web chat agent.
Service level/ASA
Service level, the percentage of calls that are answered in a defined
wait threshold, is the most common speed of answer measure in the call
center. It is most commonly stated as x percent of calls handled in y
seconds or less, while average speed of answer (ASA) represents the
average wait time of all calls in the period. In the contact center, speed of answer for Web chat should also be
measured and reported with a service level or ASA number. Many centers
measure for both initial response as well as the back-and-forth times,
since having too many open web chat sessions can slow the expected
response time once an interaction has begun. The speed of answer for email transactions on the other hand is
defined as a “response time” and may be depicted in terms of hours or
even days, rather than in seconds or minutes of elapsed time.
Summary of service measures
The most critical of these availability and speed of service measures is
the service level number and it’s worthwhile to note here that this
metric has evolved in recent years to provide a more practical,
realistic view of the service being delivered to callers. Traditionally, service level (or ASA) was measured and reported as a
average number – typically an average number for the day. However, there
are many problems with this measurement approach. Since most contact
centers have peaks and valleys of calls throughout the day, the service
level from one period to the next can vary greatly. The overstaffed
periods of the day generate a very high service level, while
understaffed periods have very low numbers. The end result is an average
for the day that may come close to the goal, but a number that does not
reflect the actual picture of service for the day. Overstaffing results in needless expense for staff and low
productivity, while understaffing means long delays, overworked staff,
and higher costs and the measure of service for the day needs to be one
that reflects this service better than just the average for day (or
worse, average for the week or month).
A better approach for measuring service level is to have a measure
that notes the number of periods of the day where service level was
acceptable. If the goal is 80% in 30 seconds, then a reasonable measure
may be to look at the number of half-hour periods of the day that were
between 75% and 85%.This measure provides more of a view of the consistency of service
being delivered, which in turn affects customer perceptions, employee
workload, and bottom-line efficiency and cost.
Quality measures
In addition to the “how fast” measures outlined above, perhaps a more
significant indicator of customer satisfaction is “how well” the
contact was handled, indicated by the following measures.
First call resolution rate
The percentage of transactions that are completed within a single
contact, often called the “one and done” ratio or first call resolution
(FCR) rate, is a crucial measure of quality. It gauges the ability of
the center, as well as of an individual, to accomplish an interaction in
a single step without requiring a transfer to another person or area,
or needing another transaction at a future time to resolve the customer
issue. The FCR rate is a crucial factor in customer perception of quality.
The satisfactory resolution of a call is tracked overall in the center,
as well as by type of call, and perhaps by time of day, by team, or by
individual.
The one-contact resolution rate should likewise be tracked in the
contact center for email transactions and Web interactions. The
resolution rate will likely be lower for emails, as it generally takes
multiple messages between two parties to resolve a matter to completion.
Recent studies have shown that the FCR rate is the single number most
closely correlated with customer satisfaction. Nothing impacts
customers’ perceptions more than simply getting their question answered
or problem resolved on the first try. Therefore, this FCR rate should
rank very high on your list of contact center KPIs.
It’s not always easy to figure out and may take some piecing together
of information from your ACD and contact management system, but it’s
worth the extra effort to track it and do whatever it takes to increase
the rate. Remember, the higher your rate, the happier your customers!
Transfer rate
The transfer percentage is an indication of how many contacts have to be
transferred to another person or place to be handled. Tracking
transfers can help fine-tune the routing strategies as well as identify
performance gaps of the staff. Likewise, tracking emails that must be
transferred to others or text chat interactions that require outside
assistance is useful to identify personnel training issues or holes in
on-line support tools. This transfer rate is an important number to track as it plays an
important part in the FCR rate that impacts customer satisfaction so
highly.
Communications skills
One of the critical factors that impact the caller’s perception of how
well the call was handled is simple etiquette and customer service
skills. The degree to which general communications skills and etiquette
are displayed is generally measured via observation or some form of
quality monitoring as an individual gauge of performance. Email and web chat etiquette should also be observed. There are
standard wordings that should be followed in both types of
communications that should be carefully observed, reviewed, and reported
as a quality measure of performance. This is particularly true since a
written record of the interaction will exist. One of the keys to measuring the effectiveness of communications
skills is to make sure you have specific guidelines and definitions of
what content and behaviors look like when done right. Define wording you
want to hear (or see) and what processes should be followed and then
watch and listen for compliance with the expectation.
Be careful about not clearly defining what a quality transaction
contains, such as quality forms that specify “demonstrated professional
attitude.” You will want to define the specific content that should be
used and what should be avoided in customer conversations so that call
reviews and coaching can continually fine-tune skills in the right
direction.
Adherence to procedures
Adherence to procedures such as workflow processes or call scripts is
another essential element of quality. This is particularly important to
perceived quality in terms of the customer receiving a consistent
interaction regardless of the contact channel or the individual agent
involved in the contact.
In the call center, adherence to processes and procedures is
typically measured for individuals through simple observation and
through the quality monitoring process.
Adherence to processes and procedures is also important for other
channels of contact. Written scripts and pre-approved responses are
generally created, and adherence to these is monitored and recorded via
observation or screen capture capabilities in a quality monitoring
system.
Customer satisfaction surveys. Many of the numbers and metrics discussed so far focus on internal
metrics – measuring inside the contact center and judging how well
you’re doing based on your own standards of performance. But it’s also
important to look outside the center and go straight to the source for
measures of customer satisfaction.
Ask your customers regularly how they think your call center is
performing. While your company may have regular customer satisfaction
surveys to gather feedback on a wide range of questions about products,
pricing, etc, it’s important to fine-tune and gather specific feedback
related to the service they received in their interaction with the call
center.
Most organizations can benefit greatly from some professional help in
writing and fine-tuning their survey instrument, administering it in a
way that ensures data validity and reliability, and analyzing survey
results. A good starting place to help you understand the important
elements and design surveys that maximize customer feedback is Fred Van
Bennekom’s book, Customer Surveying.
Efficiency measures
Executives in every type of organization are concerned with how well
the company’s resources are being put to use. That is especially true in
a call center environment where the overwhelming majority of operating
expenses are related to personnel costs.
Agent occupancy
Agent occupancy is the measure of actual time busy on customer contacts
compared to available or idle time, calculated by dividing workload
hours by staff hours. Occupancy is an important measure of how well the
call center has scheduled its staff and how efficiently resources are
being used. If occupancy is too low, agents are sitting around idle with
not enough to do. If occupancy is too high, the personnel may be
overworked.
Agent occupancy is the end result of how staffing is matched to
randomly arriving workload in a call center. However, the desired level
of occupancy may actually drive staffing decisions in a sequential work
environment like processing emails. Since web chat interactions are
essentially random events like incoming calls, the same measures of
occupancy apply here as in an incoming call scenario.
Staff shrinkage
Staff shrinkage is defined as the percentage of time that employees are
not available to handle calls. It is classified as non-productive time,
and is made up of meeting and training time, breaks, paid time off,
off-phone work, and general unexplained time where agents are not
available to handle customer interactions. Staff shrinkage is an
important number to track, since it plays an important role in how many
people will need to be scheduled each half-hour. The same measures of
shrinkage that are used for call center calculations apply to the
multichannel contact center as well.
It is important to track shrinkage by individual category. While some
time categories are unavoidable, such as paid time off and training
time, other categories should be tracked with an objective of
controlling the loss of available hours over time.
Schedule efficiency
Workforce management is all about getting the “just right” number of
people in place each period of the day to handle customer contacts—not
too many and not too few. Schedule efficiency measures the degree of
overstaffing and understaffing that exist as a result of scheduling
design. Net staffing may be measured by half-hour as an indication of
how well the resources in the center are being utilized.
Schedule efficiency for responding to the randomly arriving web chats
should be measured just like that for incoming call centers. Since
emails typically represent sequential rather than random workload, the
work fits the schedule and therefore overstaffing and understaffing
measures are less relevant. Just like for measures of service, it is likely that schedule
efficiency varies over the day and week as peaks and valleys of incoming
contacts make it difficult to get the exact right number of staff each
half-hour. Rather than looking at the plus and minus status averaged out
over the day, it is important to look at the variation that occurs by
half-hour so that schedule plans can be adjusted to best match workforce
to workload.
Schedule adherence
Schedule adherence measures the degree to which the specific hours
scheduled are actually worked by the agents. It is an overall call
center measure and is also one of the most important team and individual
measures of performance since it has such as great impact on
productivity and service.
Schedule adherence is one of the most important measures the
multichannel contact center as well. Specific hours worked is less of an
issue in a group responding to emails rather than real-time demand of
calls and Web chats, but is still relevant in processing the work in a
timely manner, especially if response time guarantees exist.
AHT/ACW
A common measure of contact handling is the average handle time (AHT),
made up of talk time plus after-call work (ACW). To accommodate
differences in calling patterns, it should be measured and identified by
time of day as well as by day of week.
Average handle time is also a measure that is important in
determining the other types of multichannel contact workload. It is much
harder to calculate, however, given the difficulties of truly measuring
how long it takes to handle an email or a Web chat transaction. An
email may be opened and put aside for varying amounts of time before
completing. Likewise, a web chat session may appear to take longer than
it actually does since a web agent typically has several sessions open
at once. Therefore each one takes longer based on start and end time.
Automated tracking of these actual handle times is difficult with
numbers coming from email management systems often overstated in terms
of actual handle time.
While AHT is almost always one of the top metrics on any contact
center’s list, it’s critical not to focus coaching efforts too directly
on the AHT number itself. While it is often desirable to correct
procedures that lengthen AHT, you don’t want to coach to AHT numbers.
When this is done, AHT goals may be reached, but at the expense of
proper call-handling techniques. It’s best to identify the specific
steps, words, and behaviors needed on a call and coach to those, not to
an AHT number.
System availability and accessibility
When response time from the computer system is slow, or if it is
cumbersome to move from application to application, it can add seconds
or minutes to the handle time of a transaction. In the call center,
system speed, uptime, and overall availability should be measured on an
ongoing basis to ensure maximum response time and efficiency as well as
service to callers. For example, if the IVR typically handles 50% of
calls to completion, but the IVR is out of service, many more calls will
require agent assistance than normal causing overtime costs, long
delays, and generally poor service. Or, if multiple applications are
needed and it’s difficult to move from one to another, it can mean much
additional handle time. Often this will be a measure of performance that
resides in the IT department, but is also a crucial measure of contact
center performance.
Profitability measures
Another category of performance measures near and dear to your
executives’ hearts includes those that indicate the inbound and outbound
flow of money in the center, as indicated by the measures below. These
next two measures are particularly important to catalog centers, where
the calls typically focus on the placement of an order.
Conversion rate
The conversion rate refers to the percentage of transactions in which a
sales opportunity is translated into an actual sale. It can be measured
as an absolute number of sales or as a percentage of calls that result
in a sale. Conversion rate should be tracked and measured for incoming
calls, as well as outgoing calls, email transactions, and other web
interactions.
Up-sell/Cross-sell rate
The up-sell rateorcross-sell rate is measured by many organizations as a
success rate at generating revenue over and above the original order or
intention of the call. It is becoming an increasingly common practice,
not just for pure revenue-generating call centers but for customer
service centers as well.
Although more prevalent in the telephone center, it is also an
appropriate measure of performance for other communications channels.
Cost per call
The flip side of revenues involves the cost of running the organization.
A common measure of operational efficiency is cost per call or cost per
minute to handle the call workload, both in a simple call center as
well as in a multichannel contact environment. This cost per call can be
simply a labor cost per call, or it can be a fully loaded rate that
includes wage rates in addition to telecommunications, facilities, and
other services costs.
In setting cost per call, it is critical to define the components
being used, and to use them consistently in evaluating how well the
center is making use of financial resources over time. While commonly
used to compare one company or site to another in benchmarking, this is
not a good practice as the components included and the types of contacts
will often vary.
Employee measures
Unfortunately, many lists of call center KPIs ends with the above
measures. However, it’s vitally important to include measures of success
with one more stakeholder group – the frontline staff. Here are two
final measures in our guide that address how happy the workforce is and
these are critical measures since a happy workforce works more
efficiently, provides better service, and stays around longer.
Staff turnover/retention
One way to measure the satisfaction of your workforce is to look at the
percentage of staff who are leaving. There can be some telling
information in these numbers and you will want to track and analyze the
turnover rates in many ways.
Look at the rate associated with different call types, as it may be
more stressful or less satisfying to handle certain types of calls. Look
at turnover by team to see if there are any supervisory influences in
keeping people or driving them away.
And you’ll definitely want to look at the level of performance of the
people leaving. If it’s primarily the worst performers leaving,
turnover is not such a bad thing, but if it’s your better performers
leaving the center, it may be time to re-examine your compensation,
recognition programs, and career path opportunities to see what’s
preventing the retention of these staff.
Employee satisfaction scores
The final metric on our list is one of the most important ones. We
stated earlier that the one metric most closely associated with customer
satisfaction was first call resolution rate. However, running a very
close second in terms of correlation with customer satisfaction is
employee satisfaction. The happier your employees are, the better
they’re treating your customers.
Once again, it’s important here to do your own employee satisfaction
survey, as the general company one from HR (assuming they do one at
all), may not address all the important areas that impact the
satisfaction of your call center staff.
An employee satisfaction survey directed at call center staff should
ask questions in the following areas: demographics, nature of the work,
training and development, performance metrics, work schedules, physical
work environment, health and wellness, supervisory support,
compensation, and general attitudes toward the center and company.
You will want to perform these surveys regularly and share overall
results with the staff so they can see how areas of concern are being
addressed.
