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.