Contact centers are notorious for being data- and metrics-driven. When you walk into a contact center, the first things you see on all available walls are pie charts, bar graphs, scattergrams, graphs showing daily number of calls completed, and more. It's data, data, and more data.
If you are an agent, you worry about your average call handle time, the number of calls/emails/chats you are completing per hour, how you are doing compared to your peers, how satisfied customers are with your answers.
If you are a contact center manager, you monitor in real time how your agents are doing by group, region, or product to understand how you are meeting service-level agreements.
But what do C-level executives care about in the boardroom? They are concerned with the quality, cost, and effectiveness of service and the measurement of the outcome of their strategic decisions, for example, measuring the success of a service strategy like outsourcing operations or automating a huge swath of tier-one support. They need data to accurately forecast performance and monitor performance trends over time. They need to make strategic technology decisions that support their key business goals.
There's a first-order disconnect between customer service agents and supervisors, who talk in the language of average handle time, service3-level agreements, or number of emails handled, and C-level executives, who care about company performance, overall customer loyalty, and churn. It's no wonder that customer service initiatives driven by customer service managers are so difficult to find buy-in at higher levels. What is needed is a bridge, a mapping between the language of agents and the language of the boardroom.
Take, for example, the need for a service organization to score the quality and completeness of knowledge base solutions. Agents and supervisors get the need for this. But your exe3cutive vice presidents will not. You need to think through the outcome of this request and express your needs in that vocabulary. We need to evolve our knowledge management solution to provide a better quality of knowledge to our agents. This will ultimately lead to a quantitative, measurable increase in our customer satisfaction, an increased first-time fix rate, and lower operating costs.
Have you started to link operational metrics to top-level business outcomes? What are effective examples that you use? Has this worked for you?
Kate Leggett is a vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research.